http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1211fbivote11.html
Dems say GOP made deceptive voter calls
Ariz. among states reporting complaints
Billy House
Republic Washington Bureau
Dec. 11, 2004 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The Phoenix resident, a registered Democrat, was suspicious when a caller told him just three days before the Nov. 2 election that he was supposed to cast his ballot across town.
No, he replied, he knew his local polling place, and the caller was wrong.
The voice on the other end of the line was insistent. The voting precinct, the caller said, had been changed to a location 30 miles from the voter's home.
No such relocation was true, and a prominent national voting rights group is investigating whether the source of the bogus call and at least three known similar calls to residents in Phoenix and Tucson was the Arizona Republican Party.
The state GOP denies any involvement.
Legal experts for the voting rights group believe that possibly thousands of other Arizonans received similar telephone calls providing wrong voting information but didn't report it.
Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, declined to provide names of Arizonans who had complained about the calls. But she plans to ask for a Justice Department investigation into those cases and similar ones in Florida when she meets Thursday with R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.
What happened in Arizona, the voting rights group believes, could be just the tip of the iceberg of an aggressive Republican strategy nationwide to intentionally confuse some eligible voters about where and how to vote in the general election.
In Florida, for instance, some voters reported they were told they could vote by phone.
In other states, people have reported to a national election protection hotline of being advised by callers, wrongly, that they could vote by laptop, and were given other wrong voting information in anonymous fliers, fake letters and house-to-house visits.
These reports are mounting as Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson this week said they will continue to press for a detailed review of reported widespread election irregularities in Ohio.
Arnwine said in an interview Friday that the misleading telephone calls to voters in Arizona provide something many of the other reported incidents across the nation do not have: hard evidence of Republican involvement.
Told of Arnwine's assertions, Bill Christiansen, executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, adamantly denied any GOP effort in Arizona to intentionally mislead voters about their polling places.
He said the state GOP did launch a massive get-out-the-vote telephone effort starting in the summer and going through Election Day, in which as many as 2.5 million total calls throughout the state were made. In those contacts, he said, information often was provided regarding a voter's local polling place.
"But our efforts were to get Republicans and others out to the polls to vote in support of President Bush," Christiansen said, "not to confuse voters."
He said calls were made to Republicans, independents and some Democratic voters who, during contacts over the summer, had indicated some support for Bush.
Allegations of deceptive telephone calls aren't the only voting problems in Arizona that have been reported to the national election protection hotline.
Maricopa County had the fourth-highest number of reported problems on Election Day or days leading up to election among all counties, with 1,313 problems in all. Only Cuyahoga County, Ohio; Philadelphia; and Los Angeles had higher numbers.
Statewide, there have been 1,187 reports to the hotline. Among those were 133 reported problems with absentee ballots; 392 complaints related to voter registration; 33 complaints of voter intimidation; 32 involving voting machine-related problems; eight complaints of non-English language assistance; 93 reported provisional ballot problems; four complaints that polling places opening late; 10 complaints that polling places closed early; 75 complaints that lines to vote were too long; and 350 more general polling place problems.
But it's the telephone calls directing Arizona voters to show up at the wrong precincts that have the attention of the lawyers committee.
"Why the incidents in Phoenix and in Pima County are so important is that, while people in most other states found that they were blocked when trying to use their Caller IDs to identify the sources of misleading calls, a couple of the Arizonans were able to do that," Arnwine said.
One of them, she said, a voter in Tucson, found a message left on his answering machine on Nov. 2 telling him to go to the wrong polling place. He used the "last number" dial-back feature and got the local Republican headquarters, she said. At least one of the phone calls or messages was tape- recorded, she said.
"Our objective here is to prevent this sort of fraud," Arnwine said. "We believe these calls were a deliberate attempt to prevent eligible voters from participating in the electoral process."
She says it doesn't matter that Bush carried Arizona handily over Democrat John Kerry, 54.9 percent to 44.4 percent, or about 1.1 million votes to more than 893,000.
"An investigation is still necessary because we believe every person has the right to have their vote counted; it is absolutely illegal to interfere with someone's exercise of their guaranteed civil right to vote," she said.
Justice Department spokesman Eric Holland said he had no information on Acosta's meeting with Arnwine.
Reach the reporter at billy.house@arizonarepublic.com or 1-(202)-906-8136