Goldmark calls still a mystery

Some Eastern Washington residents got recorded calls late at night or early in the morning last weekend, urging them to vote for Democrat Peter Goldmark for Congress.

Others got the same call, over and over. Others got an obscene call, or a call with no sound except the click of a hangup, with the campaign’s caller ID.

Some recipients are irate, but finding the responsible party could prove difficult.

A Goldmark spokesman said those calls weren’t generated by the campaign.

The campaign did hire a company to call some 88,000 Eastern Washington voters to deliver prerecorded political ads over a half-hour period last Friday evening, spokesman Dave Bullock said. But someone else seems to have “hijacked” the messages and ID to make calls after that.

John Jameson, the president of Winning Connections, which has the contract to make the calls for Goldmark, said he’s sure that his company isn’t responsible. The machines that are programmed to make the calls were shut off after 7:17 p.m. Friday when the last of the authorized calls were made, he said. They weren’t turned on again until the next day, when calls for other campaigns were made.

“The program just doesn’t start up by itself,” Jameson insisted. “We absolutely, unquestionably, unequivocally did not make these calls.”

Even though people reported the calls came with a caller ID from the Goldmark campaign, Jameson said that can be manipulated by someone familiar with call center programming. “That is not NSA technology,” he said.

Telephone calls occasionally have been a form of campaign dirty tricks. In November 2002, Republican officials hired a Sandpoint firm to make repeated calls to a Democratic operation in New Hampshire, jamming its lines and preventing it from making “get out the vote” calls on Election Day. The culprits were tracked down and eventually sent to jail.

But sometimes the cause is less than sinister. In 2000, an effort by Washington Democrats to call voters and encourage them to cast ballots for Al Gore, Maria Cantwell and other Democrats went awry when the machines apparently were programmed for the wrong times.

“It was a definite glitch, not a dirty trick,” said Michael Meehan, a campaign strategist for Cantwell this year and in 2000.

The Goldmark campaign filed a police report and notified the FBI on Monday, Bullock said. He refused to blame Rep. Cathy McMorris’ campaign, saying only that it was “an unknown harasser.”

McMorris spokeswoman Jill Strait said the McMorris campaign workers have heard about the Goldmark calls from people who called them to complain.

“We know absolutely nothing about what’s happening or why,” Strait said. “It’s good that they filed a police report, to maybe get to the bottom of it.”