David Weprin’s campaign is alleging dirty tricks in NY-9, accusing supporters of Republican Bob Turner of trying to jam communications by organizing mass phone calls to their campaign headquarters. But they’ve been slow to respond to follow up requests and a source inside the campaign downplayed the severity of the incident to TPM.
A spokeswoman for the Weprin campaign, Liz Kerr, initially told TPM that they received a “huge flood of calls” this morning that they traced to a 3 AM text message urging people to phone the campaign. It wasn’t immediately clear from official campaign statements what the messages said, who was calling, and how debilitating the supposed “phone jamming” was based on the Weprin campaign’s statements. Repeated requests for even basic follow up information, like whether law enforcement is involved and what callers were telling volunteers, have gone unanswered more than an hour after the initial phone jamming complaint.
One Weprin source told TPM that the calls were “very annoying,” but not debilitating as they have other phone lines. According to the source, callers were asking the same question, “Why doesn’t Weprin support Israel?” — a prominent line of attack against the campaign.
“Bob Turner’s Republican allies are pulling dirty tricks in a blatant attempt to steal this election because they are afraid that Democrats’ turnout operation will get voters who want to protect Medicare and Social Security to the polls,” Kerr said in a statement. “It is outrageous that Bob Turner’s allies would resort to jamming our phones in an effort to prevent our campaign from contacting voters and getting out the message about how radical Bob Turner really is. Republicans participating in phone jamming in the past have landed in jail, and there must be a full investigation into the Republican phone jamming campaign.”
As far as electoral hijinks go, Kerr is correct that phone jamming is a serious crime. In 2002, a New Hampshire Republican official, Charles McGee, hired a telemarketer to clog up the phone lines for Democrats and supporters who were ferrying voters to the polls on election day. He later plead guilty to conspiracy and spent seven months in jail.
A spokesman for Bob Turner, Bill O’Reilly, told TPM that they had nothing to do with the alleged phone jamming, which he suggested was likely exaggerated.
“We are busy talking to voters,” he said. “We have neither the interest nor the inclination to play grade school games. If, in fact, that is occurring, it is not at the direction of the Turner campaign. Mr. Weprin must have 25 phone banks working. This sounds more like an election day smoke screen for Weprin campaign mistakes.”
