From the Washington Post:

This year’s heavy volume of automated political phone calls has infuriated countless voters and triggered sharp complaints from Democrats, who say the Republican Party has crossed the line in bombarding households with recorded attacks on candidates in tight House races nationwide.

Some voters, sick of interrupted dinners and evenings, say they will punish the offending parties by opposing them in today’s elections. But critics say Republicans crafted the messages to delude voters — especially those who hang up quickly — into thinking that Democrats placed the calls.

Republicans denied the allegation, noting that their party acknowledges its authorship at the recorded calls’ end. After citizens’ complaints in New Hampshire, however, the National Republican Congressional Committee agreed to end the calls to households on the federal do-not-call list, even though the law exempts political messages from such restrictions.

Whether “robo-calls” are positive or negative, mean-spirited or humorous, thousands of Americans are sick of them, according to campaign organizations that have been fielding complaints over the past two weeks.

An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls.

Pamela Lorenz, a retired nurse in Roseville, Calif., called her own experience “harassment as far as I’m concerned” and said, “If I were voting right now, the opponent who’s doing this, he’d be off my list for throwing that much trash.”

Hour after hour and day after day for two weeks, Lorenz’s home has received the same NRCC recorded message attacking Charlie Brown, the Democrat who is challenging Rep. John T. Doolittle (R) in a hard-fought battle in northeastern California. “It is a recorder calling,” Lorenz said. “I can’t call it back to get them to stop.” Read the rest of this entry »

The NY Times has a story on the GOP robocall scam:

Karyn Hollis, an English professor at Villanova University outside Philadelphia, said the same computerized calls had been ringing her telephone as often as five times a day for more than a week.

They all start with a simple, if somewhat ambiguous, statement: “Hello, I’m calling with information about Lois Murphy,” a Pennsylvania Democrat who is the challenger in one of the hottest House races. That opening sounds “kind of positive in tone,” Ms. Hollis said. But the message quickly turns negative, blasting Ms. Murphy’s political views. After she hangs up, the phone rings again later with the same message. And again. And again.

The calls are part of a telephone blitz that the Republican Party has unleashed in several dozen races that are likely to determine control of the House in Tuesday’s elections. And the repeat calls to the same homes have set off a new furor over campaign tactics, with the Democrats claiming the calls violate federal communications rules and are tantamount to harassment.

Ms. Murphy and other Democrats say they have been flooded with complaints from irritated voters who think that the calls are coming from the candidates themselves. Many of the voters had hung up before the message was over, and never heard that it was produced by the Republican Party.

Democratic leaders contend that the messages violate federal rules that require groups making automated calls to identify themselves at the outset. And the National Republican Congressional Committee, which has financed the calls, agreed on Sunday to quit making some of them in New Hampshire, where a state law limits who can receive computerized phone messages.

Ed Patru, a committee spokesman, said the phone campaign complied with federal law and was “drawing contrasts” between the candidates. “There’s no statutory requirement that our phone calls be complimentary to Democrats,” Mr. Patru added.

Federal filings indicate that the committee has spent about $2 million on phone calls in the last week.

But Democratic officials say they fear the saturation calling is just a tactic to irritate voters and discourage them from going to the polls.

“Make no mistake about it,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat who is leading his party’s effort to retake the House. “This is a dirty trick, one they have pulled before, one they have gotten caught on, and they are still doing it.” Read the rest of this entry »

From Josh Marshall, who’s acting as a central clearinghouse for GOP vote scams:

The Emerging Scam? We checked out the stories of false flag GOP robocalls pretty closely before we were comfortable that we understood what was happening, could confirm it and start reporting on it yesterday. Now, over the course of the day, we’ve been getting other reports of Democrats getting calls informing them their voting location has been changed to what turns about to be a fake voting location.

TPMmuckraker reported on this earlier today about reports in New Mexico. But it wasn’t clear whether or not it was an isolated incident.

Over the course of the day, though, we’ve been getting more reports of this from across the country — NM, MN, WI, NY and other states. Enough that I’m starting to suspect that this is some sort of coordinated effort. (If this is a coordinated effort, I suspect it’ll be much more carefully hidden than the false-flag robocalls, since I suspect this would tip the scales into prosecutable election tampering.)

Let me be crystal clear: in the case of the false flag robocalls, we’ve heard the calls; we know the company placing them; we know the GOP committee paying for them; we know the complaints surfacing around the country. This is different. These reports are still too sketchy to say whether this coordinated or being directed nationally. In some cases, it may not even be intentional. With two mammoth GOTV operations ramping up nationwide, some confusion is probably inevitable. But we’re hearing a sufficient number of reports from different parts of the country, to send up a flare, a virtual alert, if you will. So don’t treat this is a fact but rather as an advisory, to be on the look out.

If you’ve gotten these calls and you have specifics, or if you’ve seen press reports about calls like this, let us know.

They simply will do anything to keep Democrats from voting. No fraud, no crime, no unethical approach is too low. AmericaBlog:

UPDATE: Add New Jersey to the growing list of states where the Republican party is trying to defraud voters with fake phone calls.

UPDATE: Fraudulent calls hitting Virginia voters too. In Virginia, Democratic voters are getting phone calls telling them they’ll be arrested (Markos has the audio via the link above).

The fraudulent GOP voter-intimidation scam has now hit Washington state. Other states being targeted by the GOP calls, that we know of so far, include Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New York.

We are the point of needing an FBI investigation because this is now clearly happening across the country in a clearly coordinated way (across interstate lines, mind you).

The Republican party is engaging in a campaign to defraud the voters and Democratic congressional campaigns by making phone calls to voters, often late at night and repeated, and making the voters think that the calls are coming from the Democratic campaigns when in fact they’re coming from the Republicans.

This is fraud. It an effort to steal the vote. It violates a number of consumer telemarketing laws, and more.

We already knew the GOP had decided to run racist and anti-semitic ads in the South and out West, which have they have done. But no one had any idea that the Republicans were willing to defraud voters in order to trick them out of their votes. If there isn’t a felony here, there should be.

It’s sad that the Republicans so don’t want to talk about the issues, the war, the economy, health care, gas prices, and more, that they will do anything to stop you from voting. It’s sick, and pathetic, and is a sign of how corrupt the Republican party has become in America. At the same time they’ve killed nearly 3,000 American troops in Iraq fighting for, we’re told, “democracy,” the Republican party slowly destroys that very same democracy at home.

This has turned into a national story.