thattallguy201 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} thattallguy201) wrote,@ 2006-11-07 16:59:00 |
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IOKIYAR ("It's OK if you're a Republican")
By now most of you know that the Republican National Congressional Committee has been running an election eve dirty-tricks campaign to get voters irritated at Democratic candidates across the country, including the NH-02 candidate Paul Hodes. Let's look at some details.
And a bit of perspective: Two million dollars is enough, in these internet-phone days, to make something on the order of a hundred million phone calls. Concentrate that into 20 districts, at 650,000 people per district -- let's say about 400,000 voters with phones to receive five million calls. Does this still sound like a "kinder, gentler GOP"?
I'll be making lots of GOTV calls today. I hate cold calling -- but some things are worth it.
GO VOTE!
(Side note: Hey Hopfgarten, are you still reading this? What's your defense of your party? This oughtta be good.)
By now most of you know that the Republican National Congressional Committee has been running an election eve dirty-tricks campaign to get voters irritated at Democratic candidates across the country, including the NH-02 candidate Paul Hodes. Let's look at some details.
- The NRCC admits to being the source of these calls.
- The calls cover 20 races across the country.
- The calls are prima facie illegal in that the identification of the calling party is at the end of the call rather than the beginning, and that calls were being made to people on the Do Not Call list (calls by live people to people on the list for political purposes are legal; robocalls are not.)
- If (and only if) you hang up before finding out it's a negative ad, the call gets repeated. A lot. Meaning that you think the Dem candidate is harassing you -- which is really the point of this whole exercise; it's called voter suppression and, despite the fact that actvely discouraging voters from voting is about as contrary to running a democracy as you can get, this is a repeated theme of Republican election efforts these days.
- And if you haven't already decided the instigators of this trick are slime, here's their response:
"It's a complicated legal question that's not going to get adjudicated this weekend," he said.
In other words -- we picked this time to do it expressly so that you can't stop us.
And a bit of perspective: Two million dollars is enough, in these internet-phone days, to make something on the order of a hundred million phone calls. Concentrate that into 20 districts, at 650,000 people per district -- let's say about 400,000 voters with phones to receive five million calls. Does this still sound like a "kinder, gentler GOP"?
I'll be making lots of GOTV calls today. I hate cold calling -- but some things are worth it.
GO VOTE!
(Side note: Hey Hopfgarten, are you still reading this? What's your defense of your party? This oughtta be good.)
