A criminal investigation on local, state and federal levels is underway to examine allegations of illegal Election Day activity by a senior official within the New Hampshire Republican Party.
Chuck McGee, executive director of the Republican State Committee and the top state party staffer for the past two years, resigned Friday amid accusations that he led an Election Day operation to jam pro-Democrat get-out-the-vote phone banks.
McGee, who refused The Dartmouth's requests for comment, is suspected of paying GOP Marketplace $15,600 to hire Idaho-based telemarketing firm Milo Enterprises to jam phone lines at six locations on Nov. 5, thus hurting efforts by the Manchester firefighters' union and the New Hampshire Democratic Party to bring voters to the polls.
The jammed phone lines, cleared by Verizon after two hours, hindered efforts to reach people who needed rides to polling stations, union and Democratic officials said.
Manchester Police Department Lt. Detective Fred Roach said GOP Marketplace, a firm pairing campaigns with telephone vendors, hired Milo to make repeated hang-up calls on Nov. 5 to union and NHDP-operated phone banks.
"[Milo] said they were a telemarketing firm for hire and had been paid in advance to repeatedly call a variety of phone numbers in New Hampshire on November 5," Roach told news outlets last week.
Local and state authorities have enlisted the United States Justice Department's help, as the alleged actions may have violated harassment laws in multiple states.
In the days since the allegations were made public, McGee's and the state Republican party's stances on the phone-jamming allegations have at times conflicted. In a story in Friday's Manchester Union Leader, McGee said he had only vaguely heard of one of the two companies involved and that the party had not hired that company. On the same day, state GOP chair Jayne Millerick said that the party paid GOP Marketplace only to encourage people to vote Republican and that neither McGee nor the NHRP were involved with the jammed lines.
And in an interview with The Dartmouth yesterday, Millerick said, "Chuck [McGee] had indicated to me that those calls were for get-out-the-vote purposes ... he also said that those calls never happened."
Millerick attributed McGee's abrupt resignation to the "distraction" resulting from the growing controversy and its potential to detract from future party efforts.
"Those actions will never be tolerated here," she said emphatically, while avoiding repeated questions about the existence of any internal GOP investigations.
Meanwhile, New Hampshire Democrats have seized this opportunity to investigate Republican wrongdoing.
Yesterday, NHDP chair Kathy Sullivan petitioned acting state attorney general Stephen Judge and U.S. Attorney Thomas Colantuono to investigate "this criminal conspiracy to affect the election."
According to Sullivan, the jammed lines were those of offices in areas with five of the closest state Senate races. Three were won by Democrats, two by Republicans.
"There are three unanswered questions: where did this money come from, who knew about it and who authorized it," NHDP press secretary Colin Van Ostern said. "Until we have the answers to these questions, we're going to persue investigations in every way we can."
Because of the paper trail involved, "this is one of the rare situations in which we know there was a problem going on and we can do something about it," Van Ostern said. "We will pursue this to the fullest extent of the law."
Van Ostern said that the possibility of further legal action against the state GOP will be examined in coming weeks.
