SurveyUSA: Yarmouth (D) 50%, Northup (R) 45% in Kentucky 3rd CD.
WaPo releases its robo-call story. Judge for yourself.
Late Update: Longtime TPM Reader PJ says “I think that WaPo article is terrific. If we got treated that well by the MSM all the time, I would be ecstatic.”
We’ve spoken a lot about these ‘false-flag’ GOP robo-calls and a lot of you have asked questions. So let me, as concisely as I can, explain what the complaints are about.
There are two basic issues about the calls. And to understand what the fuss is about, you need to understand the two together.
First, the calls themselves.
Most of the call’s script is a fairly standard attack robocall, a series of Republican talking points aimed at the Democratic congressional in a particular district. Nothing particularly noteworthy. The key is the introduction. The lead into the call starts with the speaker saying ‘I’m calling with information about’ Dem candidate X. Then there’s a short pause.
At this point, you know it’s an annoying robocall, so a lot of people just hang up. If you hang up then, you think it’s a call from the Democratic candidate.
Second, the repetition. And this part is the key. If you don’t listen through the whole message, the machine keeps calling you back, often well in excess of half a dozen times with the same call. It only stops if you listen all the way through.
As you can imagine, that’s driving a lot of people through the roof.
In other words, the Republicans behind the calls win either way. If you keep hanging up, you think you’re being harassed by the campaign of the local Democratic House candidate. If you give up and listen all the way through, you hear the political attack. The true source of the call, the NRCC, the GOP House campaign committee, is only revealed at the end of the call.
(Federal regulations dictate calls be identified at the top of the call.)
Third, and for this there is as yet only anecdotal evidence, many of the calls seem to be going out overnight or during, say, a major sporting event in the given district.
These sorts of operations are supposed to glide under the radar, having maximum impact with minimal press attention.
And that’s pretty much how it worked.
People only started catching on mid-late last week as Democratic campaign after campaign started fielding complaints from voters about robocalls their campaigns weren’t even making. Even then, individual campaigns dealt with it mainly on their own. Only over the weekend did different people start putting the puzzle together.
It’s impossible to say how many voters out there are pissed off because they think they’re being phone-stalked by the local Democratic candidate. And there’s no way to tell just what the effect will be at the ballot box. But the intention is clear: suppress the Democratic vote by harassing voters with repetitive phone calls and deceiving them about who it is that’s calling them.
Remember, this is the same crew that pulled a not dissimilar phone scheme in 2002 which resulted in multiple felony convictions. This time they’ve just taken it nationwide. This is their strategy.
SurveyUSA: Madrid (D) 50%, Wilson (R) 48% in New Mexico 1st.
Keeping the bloggers at bay:
Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and for the next five hours, these experts will pore over exit-poll data from across the country.
If all goes well, only when they emerge from their cloisters will the legions of ravenous political bloggers have any chance of getting their hands on the earliest indication of which party will end up controlling Congress.
Let’s just remember folks that this is about protecting the value of their proprietary information, not some high-minded effort to prevent the misuse of the polling data. That’s fine. No one is expected to reveal his or her scoop in advance (in this instance, literally before it’s ready for primetime).
What remains ironic though is that it’s the major news organizations themselves that over-rely on the exit polls and have done so for years. The 2000 and 2004 debacles aside, the exit polls have long driven the networks’ election night coverage, providing them with the pretense of speaking authoritatively about the results before the results are known.
It is television that has turned election night into the political equivalent of the Superbowl, where the Democrats and Republicans will battle it out for four hours or so and then a winner will be handed the trophy by a beaming TV announcer. For those four hours, they want us on the couch eating Doritos, not surfing the web for exit poll data.
You wonder though. If all the money the networks pour into exit polling went instead into political reporting, actual political reporting, wearing out the shoe leather about who’s doing what and where during the last hours of the campaigns and on election day, whether the result might be more informative for the electorate. Maybe, for instance, the networks would have caught on to the NRCC’s nationwide robocall scam first, instead of the blogs.
The networks closing themselves off in sealed rooms with no connections to the outside world for five hours in the middle of Election Day is, in many ways, the perfect metaphor for what is wrong with the mainstream media.
Doc, there’s a ringing in my ears all night long. I think I’ve got a Republican in my district. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
TPM Reader AM checks in from Ohio:
Reporting from Summit County, where we use optical scan machines: my husband and I were in line at 6:30 a.m. when the polls opened so we were the 14th & 15th people in our precinct (8-C) to vote. Unfortunately, the optical scanner wouldn’t accept any ballots. I hung around until 7:30 a.m. to see if they got it working and when I left it was still down. Of course, it took all 4 of the octogenarians staffing the precinct table to try to “fix” the problem so the line was backed up out the door & into the parking lot, where voters were treated to a light morning drizzle.
Sure hope my vote gets counted. And I hope not too many people had to bail out of the line in order to make it to their jobs on time.
Real-time reporting of election-related problems can be found here. Scroll down and click on the U.S. map. You will be able to view by state and county. Ohio jumps out already this morning with numerous reports of problems in the largest counties. The site seems to be getting a lot of traffic and is slow to load.
Late Update: The site has crashed.
It was widely reported yesterday that Missouri’s Democratic secretary of state had trouble voting absentee in the St. Louis area:
Secretary of State Robin Carnahan raised concerns about potential voter confusion in Tuesday’s elections, citing her own experience casting an absentee ballot as an indication that some poll workers may wrongly be asking voters for a photo identification.
Carnahan told The Associated Press on Monday that a worker at the St. Louis Election Board asked her three times to show a photo identification when she voted absentee last Friday – despite a Missouri Supreme Court ruling striking down the photo requirement.
We’ll be keeping an eye today on whether this remains a problem in Missouri precincts, where the Talent-McCaskill race is too close to call.