by Pris Sears, illustrated by Ben Capozzi
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Another election cycle, another raft of dirty tricks. Are you wondering what "push polling" or "caging" is? Wonder no more! We at 16 Blocks are pleased to provide you with the following lexicon of dirt. Feast your eyes upon this collection of tricks and techniques used to mold and manipulate votes and voters. If you encounter any of these dirty tricks over the coming year, please don't hesitate to inform us or the media outlet of your choice. An informed public is a public that is better prepared to resist these underhanded but sadly common scenarios. |
A special type of voter suppression, caging involves sending registered mail to a voter's home. If the mail is not accepted and signed for, the hapless recipient's right to vote is challenged and an attempt is made to have them purged from the voting rolls. This particularly affects working-class people that aren't home during the day, and also people that move frequently, are homeless, or are deployed active-duty military.
Simply put, making sure people can't vote. As it was historically employed in the United States, it made registration selectively difficult. The undesirable voter would be subjected to literacy tests, such as reading portions of the Constitution out loud and writing parts down from dictation. These laws were specifically designed to keep Blacks from voting, and they were common in the southern US until the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced them to stop. Modern improvements on this technique range from felons having their right to vote permanently taken away, to states requiring picture IDs to vote. Disenfranchisement disproportionately affects elderly, poor, and African-American people. According to drivingvotes.org, in Florida alone, one out of three African- American men can't vote.
Setting up automated bogus phone calls that are repeated over and over and claim to be from the opposing party. The point is to annoy citizens in the hopes that they will become so angry they won't vote for the candidate that is supposedly doing the calling.
Mechanically dialing phone numbers hundreds of times an hour to prevent them from being used by legitimate callers. Allen Raymond went to jail for doing this to Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire in the 2002 Senate election. He recently got out of jail and published a book in which he claims to have been hired (and later thrown under the bus) by James Tobin, northeast regional director of the Republican National Committee.
Not the opposite of binging, purging is a method of getting people's names removed from the rolls of eligible voters. In Florida before the 2000 election, voting rolls were purged of many thousands of supposed felons, but there were lots of "false positives" meaning that people were purged that were not felons at all.
An electronic age dirty trick, vote flipping involves manipulating electronic voting machines to "flip" a vote from one candidate to another. Since many electronic voting machines don't keep a paper-trail to show what candidates voters punched in a vote for, it's impossible to verify that vote flipping has or has not happened. It definitely does happen, although there is debate on whether it is caused by software and hardware glitches or by deliberate sabotage. Researchers have proved that it is definitely possible to sabotage electronic voting machines without being detected, so as with many dirty tricks, the public isn't likely to know that it has happened unless someone blows the whistle, confesses, or is caught red-handed.
Perpetrators call voters pretending to be doing opinion polls and then use the opportunity to say negative things about an opposing candidate. Karl Rove was rumored to have been involved in a push poll in South Carolina in the Republican presidential primary of 2000,which asked, regarding Bush's then-rival, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"
A term popularized by Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, the classic book about dirty tricks in the Nixon era. The term has the connotation of infiltrating the opposing party to spy and sow discord, up to and including trying to cause riots. Nixon's dirty tricksters burglarized and spied on the Democratic party and disrupted rallies by pretending to be organizers. Other stunts included canceling meeting-place reservations, jamming phones, and that beloved prank of high-school kids everywhere, ordering mass quantities of food in someone else's name.
The time-honored political tradition of making up lies about your opponent. It's perfectly OK to use against your own party, as we saw in the 2000 Republican primary when smearing literature was disseminated claiming that John McCain had committed treason, was mentally ill due to his P.O.W. experiences in Vietnam, and that he was a gay drug addict. A slightly more high-tech smear can be found in the currently circulating email claiming that "Obama is a Muslim who will use the presidency to destroy the USA from the inside out!!"
A variety of tricks used to deter voting. In the 2004 election, tricksters called people at home and told them that their voting place or the date of the election had changed. They also sent letters to people's homes telling them that their voting registration was invalid and that they risked jail time if they attempted to vote.