Dems say GOP made deceptive voter calls in Arizona and Other States

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. [more]