Posted on 01/13/2008 10:21:43 AM PST by mnehring
Jennifer Call's eyes searched the office for nothing in particular. Her arms waved and her fear spilled out.
"This is where I grew up," Sutton's town clerk said yesterday. "This is my hometown, this is where my family is, and all of sudden, my name is being splashed across the internet as this horrible person. And the frightening part is, I don't know these people and they don't know me."
Call wants the nationwide army of boisterous Ron Paul supporters, believers in more conspiracy theories than Oliver Stone, to know that she's committed no crime.
Not treason, as the dozens of phone callers screamed. Not fraud, as the dozens of e-mails charged. Nothing.
Human error, by someone unknown, caused Call's office to claim Paul received zero votes from the town during Tuesday's first-in-the-nation primary.
Paul actually got a whopping 31 votes.
Out of 920 cast.
Launch an investigation. Alert the media.
The mistake was corrected early the next morning, but that hardly mattered. The Paul machine, upon reading the number in print, quickly went into counteroffensive mode.
This is luck at its worst. Screw up Rudy Giuliani's vote total. Or John McCain's. Or John Edwards's. Or Bill Richardson's.
But never, ever get anything wrong when it comes to Paul and his voting tally. If you do, fans who shouted from the rooftops through the primary season will track you down and chew you out.
"Most of the these people are not rational," Call said.
Call, 35, arrived at the Pillsbury Memorial Hall Tuesday morning at 7 for the start of a marathon day. About a dozen or so staffers coordinated the effort, guiding voters, counting votes, rechecking totals.
Paul's 31 votes got lost in the shuffle, lost in translation between moderator Greg Hill's voice and Call's pen.
The slot next to Paul's name on the original return sheet said 31, but a space on Call's return, next to Paul's name, remained blank.
"He's (Gill) reading off his results, I'm writing them down on the return," Call said. "I don't know why it was blank. I don't know if he skipped over it or if someone interrupted him to repeat the last name and it got skipped, or maybe I missed it. It was that simple."
No it wasn't.
Call was met by town officials the next morning at 9:30. They told her the mistake had been rectified. Call, her jacket still on, was confused.
"What are you talking about?" she asked.
She was told someone had come in and said he'd voted for Paul. The voter noticed the "0" in the local newspaper and wanted an explanation. When he got it, he left, satisfied.
Call phoned the Secretary of State's office and re-faxed the form, the one with a circled "31" next to Paul's name. Just to make sure.
Then it hit, like one of those snowstorms last month. Call got a call from someone named Bob. No last name. She remembers the man identifying himself as a reporter for the Associated Press, looking for the story on voter fraud.
She said she'd fetch the details, then call him back, thinking the media would need a strict timeline and every tidbit available.
"I'm thinking he's legitimate," Call said. "I call Bob back and it's a fax machine. I called AP and asked for Bob. They told me a reporter would have given a last name."
Others in the office received calls and e-mails. But Call was the name out front, the town clerk as well as the tax collector. She was labeled the brains behind the plot. She had the biggest target on her back.
The assault picked up after lunch. Paul supporters phoning Call claimed to be from the media. Others just yelled, saying she had committed treason, fraud. One person said she should be shot. She received as many as 40 calls that day.
"One person said he was on a nationally syndicated radio station," Call said, "and he has given out my phone number and they need to call the town of Sutton to find out why there's voter fraud."
The voices came from everywhere. California. Ohio. Florida. Michigan. Very few were from New Hampshire.
A man from Texas e-mailed that he was "contacting, by certified mail, the Attorney General of New Hampshire . . . and requesting a complete investigation and prosecution of any and all parties involved."
A police dispatcher in New London said yesterday she'd received inquiries about the clerk's office phone.
Call got a handful of calls that night at home, refusing to pick up whenever an out-of-state number appeared on her screen.
She got about five more the next day in her office. She tried to get work done. She called the Massachusetts company that makes the licenses for dog owners in her area. The guy had heard of her.
"Wow," the man said. "This is the second time this week I've seen your name."
"Where?" Call asked.
"I've gotten a dozen e-mails about how you've destroyed the New Hampshire primary."
"Why?"
"We make voting machines."
"The problem is," Call said yesterday, "we don't use voting machines."
She went home and locked her doors. She called her mother in North Carolina. She cried. The calls kept coming. She unhooked her answering machine and requested an unlisted number.
"I was drained emotionally and physically," Call said. "That's when I really started to freak out. Thursday it hit me, that most of these people are not rational. That's when I became scared."
It's calmer now. The calls and e-mails had stopped as of yesterday afternoon. Call had the day off, but she went into her office to retrieve some paperwork.
She's hurt and nervous, but she's got a job.
"I've got a school board meeting Saturday," Call said. "I've got to be ready."
The Brownshirts strike again....they are as rabid as their leader....
Very true, but they tend to be a small fringe element, not the majority as with the Paulbots
Ooops... typo error...should read "Paul reports he's not the clown jerk" Sorry y'all about that typo.
Yes, but what were the votes for fairness? How come they weren't listed? They're committing voter fraud! Fairness might have feelings, you know! COUNT ALL THE VOTES!
I wonder, honestly, how much write in votes cost American taxpayers each presidental election.
Ron Paul has a lot of conspiracy theory moonbat supporters. Naturally he’s going to be the fulcrum of conspiracy theories. They keep saying he’s being censored by Fox News, his poll numbers are being supressed, who knows what else in the inner circles of these fanatics. The biggest one is yet to come, when he finally loses.
For perspective, I lived in NH for several years and almost everything governmental occurs at the town level. When you need anything official, it’s off to the old clapboard building that’s been in use for 100 years, schlepp up the wooden stairs and go to that flirty Sally for your voter reg; to Mom-like Cathy for your car tags; and to genial old Fred for your hunting license. Imagine Hooterville (for those that can).
You’d no more accuse such people of “voter fraud” than you would your longtime independent car mechanic or the nice lady who runs the grocery store deli.
Of course the Paul people understand much about theory and little about the real world. New Hampshire’s about as real as real gets when it comes to local government access.
“Most of the these people are not rational,” Call said.
Seems rational to me that if you know you voted for someone, but the clerk says there were no votes for that guy, you’d get pretty angry.
I'm sure that is true, although it appears that a very large portion of the Paul supports are nut-cases on par with Ron Paul himself.
The same is true in much of the rural South.
You might as well accuse the lady who teaches the 5th grade Sunday School of committing bank robbery.
The Paul supporters are, by and large, as nutty as a pecan grove.
Ron Paul's candidacy is the real conspiracy.
They flubbed up the vote totals.
We should expect better of election officials!
“The assault picked up after lunch. Paul supporters phoning Call claimed to be from the media. Others just yelled, saying she had committed treason, fraud. One person said she should be shot. She received as many as 40 calls that day”
So 40 calls, 1 dope made a threat.
Run for the hills! ALL Paul supporters and Paul himself must be nuts.
Let the pile on begin!
We don’t play by those rules in the United States. They think we are Czarist Russia and see their selves as the young Bolsheviks
17 posted on 01/13/2008 10:33:04 AM PST by HereInTheHeartland (”We have to drain the swamp” George Bush, September 2001)
Pretty funny comment considering you’re a Bush supporter. You know, the guy whose DOJ filed papers IN SUPPORT OF the DC gun ban, and who increased the Federal Bureaucracy more than Clinton did.
The Ronulan Empire will fall
And the paulistinians on FR are making excuses for the brownshirts. Shameless.
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