How it works

December 20th, 2007 3:51 pm · 1 comment

Wow, just… wow.

Guy named Allen Raymond has just penned a book, “How to Rig An Election.” He’s a former GOP operative who took part in - and then got entirely blamed for - the 2002 jamming of New Hampshire phone banks. He got p*ssed because, as he says, when it all hit the fan “my political party and my former colleagues not only threw me under the bus but then blamed me for getting run over.”

This, via TPMmuckraker, speaks to how you might use race as a tool against those who are supposed to be more tolerant - i.e., Democrats:

We’re targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter.”

“Oh,” I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. “How about ‘angry black man’?”

“Yeah, that sounds good. What’s his voice sound like?”

So I cued up one particular actor’s CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.

After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, “That’s the guy!”

So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, “I’m calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt.”

I’m not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was “I’m ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don’t vote for the Democrat I’m going to come to your house and take care of some business.”

The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be “I’m not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house.”

We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone’s character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.

Remember — they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

Zimmer lost the election by 481 votes and the Green Party candidate picked up 2 percent in the polls.

This is how it works. And, sad to say, it does indeed work.

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  1 comment  Tags: Dirty Politics

There is currently 1 comment on this blog post
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hahaha
12/20/07
4:22 PM
You forgot to mention that only one side does it. You know... the bad eggs.
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