How to Rig an Election

With it being a frosty 58 degrees with a bit of wind outside, I ended up staying inside and learning that the government is evil this weekend (actually Friday night I headed up to the Getty to meet up with several family members - which was very nice). This consisted of reading Fair Game, catching up on daily show episodes and reading How to Rig an Election.

How to rig an election is the story of Allen Raymond who worked on multiple Republican campaigns and was eventually sent to jail for blocking the phones of democrat call centers in New Hampshire on election day. He talks about some of the tricks he pulled, a lot of which were based around direct mailings and calling. He also discussed how he would take minor facts about the opponent and blow it out of proportion. For one candidate who got campaign financing from a questionable source he got that source to give a small amount to the other candidate so that when his guy was accused of taking the money he was able to throw it in the other guy's face. In the direct mailings he would take quotations from the opponent that occurred at vastly different times and string them together to make the person look horrible. In one of his early campaigns he claimed that the opponent who had run a summer camp fired all of the employees and took a giant bonus for himself. In reality the employees were councilors and were "fired" because it was the end of the summer and at the end of the summer he figured out how much money was left and gave himself a portion as his salary. Allen also did a lot of this against the wishes of the candidate he was working for. One example of the phone stuff Allen did was to target particular groups of voters that were likely to have a racial bias against other groups and have a recording of someone in that group supporting the opponent. I was going to list some examples, but they are sufficiently racist I'll leave it to your imagination.

He never wanted to do anything illegal, but beyond that didn't worry about ethics. There were two items that were responsible for getting him arrested. One was a set of phone calls he created that went out to select people during the super bowl claiming to be from a made up organization, but sounding like it came from two of the three candidates in a republican primary (I think for senator of New Jersey). The whole idea was to get people mad at those candidates for calling during the super bowl. The other one that got him in jail was arranging for so many people to call the Democrat's get out the vote centers in New Hampshire that it would shut down their phone lines. One of the call centers was at a volunteer firefighter station. He had actually asked a lawyer if it was illegal and was told no, but did not get it in writing.

One interesting item is that as crooked as this guy seemed, he thought that Rove and the Bush team really crossed the line. Also he chose to work for the Republican party because it looked like they would be on the upswing so that's where the money was. So he wasn't in it because he believed in the cause. But it also wasn't pure greed because he came from a wealthy family and for the first several years he had a small salary and was living off money from his family (of course later on he did quite well for himself).

It is a bit of an odd read, because no matter how reformed he claims he is, it is hard to be too trusting of anything he says. And even if he thinks he is telling the truth, he clearly has a bit of an odd perspective on the world.

So the conclusion of this weekend is don't trust the government, don't trust the media, don't trust anyone. The entire political process is evil and lies. And all this especially applies to Bush/Cheney/Libby/Rove. Hm, I'm actually not sure to what degree that conclusion is serious or a joke. Well, the don't trust anyone might be going to far, but I think I'm actually serious about the rest.