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."
It does seem silly, but placement of a candidate on the ballot is an issue that has been explored, and due to the IQ of yer average voter, or maybe even their indecision for whom to vote, it can matter in many cases where a candidate's name is placed on the ballot.
F****** lunatics.
Ah, the Thorazine Shuffle.
You meant to say Faux News, right? Ron Paul 2008
How many death threats would your family accept before deciding they weren't dopey?
Your posts are exactly why folks refer to FR as lunatic fringe, troll.
You meant to say 'Fraud Paul, right?
“How many death threats would your family accept before deciding they weren’t dopey?
I got a threat from you asking for my number so you could harass me.
I condemned the death threat but it was an out of state call and I doubt it was real.
I agree. This woman deserves the harassment. If you get a vote tally at the end of counting all the ballots and you see that one candidate who has spent a lot of money in the state on advertising gets zero votes, you are willfully negligent and acting irresponsibly by not checking the vote totals. It’s not like the tally said Mark Klein or Neil Fendig had zero votes. Ron Paul signs were everywhere here and his ads were on TV and radio all the time.
MSM isn’t biased (much).
“Your posts are exactly why folks refer to FR as lunatic fringe, troll.”
Troll: To deliberately post false or controversial messages to gain attention for the sake of attention, usually from people who genuinely want to help. The act of posting false messages is called trolling.
It’s the namecalling and infighting, typified by your posts, which gives FR a bad rep.
Not only do you refer to death threats as dopey, you are now whining that I threatened you. You really are a piece of work, little troll. Crawl back under your gnarled little tree. You are boring me. Yawn.
“Not only do you refer to death threats as dopey, you are now whining that I threatened you. You really are a piece of work, little troll. Crawl back under your gnarled little tree. You are boring me. Yawn.”
No whine there.
Like I said, infantile namecalling is what gives FR a bad rep.
A troll is a user of a newsgroup, forum or message board that posts messages with the intent of inciting an argument or flame-war.
Isn’t that what you’re doing by your namecalling?
Anyone that continues to support Paul, with the mountain of information that has been exposed about him and the stuff he spews when he opens his mouth, is not rational and should not be taken seriously.
If you actually give a darn about the facts or the truth,you are the one who should check out the last debate. It seems that so many are so eager to ridicule and denigrate Ron Paul they don't even hear what he says,or even what the question Brit posed was.
If you listen, Bret Hume subtly changed the question given to the others and then used his own (Humes) deception for a "gotcha" moment. I lost much respect for Brit with that little machination.
For any one interested,Bret's question to Paul was "What if this happens again?" Paul was attempting to answer that question and said that he would be less likely to jump into something with Iran than the other debaters. (I believe,the answer before the slight change in the question was given by Huckabee and ended with Iran should be warned if it happened again that they (Iran) should be prepared to see the "Gates of Hell".)
Thompson said something to the effect that they (Iranians) should be prepared to meet the virgins.
Granted they all said the commander made the right decision to withhold fire but the question to Paul was not whether or not the commander made the right decision,the question to him and I repeat was "What if this happens again?" No wonder he appeared confused.
If you listen,you will hear and if you are fair,you cannot deny that some chicanery was involved in that exchange. When they panned the faces of the other candidates and showed their smug,arrogant and condescending smirks I came much closer to deciding Ron Paul was the candidate I would support. I think something he is saying must be scary to the persons who seem quite determined to preselect our choices for President of the United States of America.
Well, even that would have made more sense! Fred always polled at about 1% in NH. Paul was always at about 7% or so.
Not only that, the next day the Pantagon said that the warning didn’t come from the Iranian ships - it came from the ‘Philippino Monkey,’ some mysterious nutjob with a shortwave who has harassed Gulf shipping for years.
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