Defensive Voting 101

If we ever get secondary schools to renew teaching civics, they should include "How to Avoid being Duped as Voters" in the curriculum.

Allen Raymond, one of the Republicans who went to jail for phone jamming on election night 2002 in New Hampshire to block the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort, while the Republicans conducted their GOTV, is publishing a confession book, "How to Rig an Election."

Figures Raymond would be proud of smacking democracy in the face. He's miffed the GOP "threw me under the bus," but, really, when you sleep with snakes you have to figure you're going to get bit, no? So, Raymond seems to be dishing some dirt that includes duping New Jersey voters, too. Jamestown Associates employed Raymond to use phone dirty tricks in the barely failed attempt to get Dick Zimmer into the House seat Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., won.

"Back in 2002," he writes, "just about every Republican operative was so dizzy with power that if you could find two of us who could still tell the difference between politics and crime, you could probably have rubbed us together for fire as well."

It has hit my radar a time or two that former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's daughter, Kate, who now has put her hat in the political ring, was the communications director for the N.H. GOP at the time the phone-jamming crime took place. And I remember Mamma's campaign director Ed Rollins paid black ministers to supress minority voters who typically vote for Democrats to win her squeaker '93 election.

Paul Kiel put pieces together in a 2006 post at TPMcafe. It's time to revisit some of that, particularly how the matrix moves around Raymond's work for the convicted U.S. Senate candidate James Treffinger, the only big GOP kill wannabe caped crusader U.S. Attorney Chris Christie wants to give himself credit for even though it most likely was a done deal before he and brother Todd bought Christie's job to boost his own political career.

(Flickr photo, right, by kelldar)