How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted January 17, 2008.

Allen Raymond worked inside Republican election circles for years, until he was convicted of illegally jamming telephone lines to New Hampshire Democratic Party offices on Election Day in 2002. After serving five months in jail, he and co-author Ian Spiegelman wrote How to Rig An Election, Confessions of a Republican Operative. The book details Raymond's rise in GOP campaign circles; the attitude, tactics and strategies used to win; and how the RNC asked his firm to jam Democratic phone lines, but would not defend him in court after Democrats fought back and pressed court charges. AlterNet's Steven Rosenfeld interviewed Raymond about his political education, GOP tactics and his take on the current presidential field.

ALTERNET: The title of your book is How to Rig an Election. Can elections be rigged?

RAYMOND:: Sure. We're not talking about what people often think about, like ballot box stuffing. Certainly, that stuff goes on here and there. What we are really talking about in the book is how messages are created and delivered to the voting public, in a way that orchestrates and manipulates response. It's all about feeling an emotion; it's not about raw issues and logic.

In the book I give a lot of examples of rigging elections by, put it this way, guys like me -- I used to be a campaign manager. Once you are all said and done and deliver a message, two plus two equals whatever I want it to equal. The facts and sometimes even contorting the facts to lead voters to conclusions that may not necessarily, if you step back, make any sense -- but, in context, make all the sense in the world.

There's that aspect of it. Then there's just the more raw aspect of it, which leads up to the culmination of the book, which is the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal.

ALTERNET: Why is emotion more important than facts?

RAYMOND:: Well, because people are looking at the candidates. The candidates are on television, mostly. That's where they get their information, particularly on presidential campaigns. Less so in congressional campaigns and local elections, but in presidential campaigns, that's where voters get their information -- by watching the television news. The characters are there. They are defined for them. They know what they look like. They can read their facial expressions. They can hear their words if they're spoken. Largely, that's where people are getting their information, as opposed to information from print media, which is just not the case anymore.

The candidates can't help but speak and emote. It's that famous saying from the Roger Ailes book, "You are the message." You have to believe what you are saying. And so, in that way, it's the medium in which most voters are getting their information.

ALTERNET: Is television particularly conducive to contorting the facts?

RAYMOND:: Or just manipulating the emotions, or even orchestrating emotions. Look at the reasons given for Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire, and that's because of two emotional moments. It wasn't winning the day with argument. It was two emotional moments.

ALTERNET: Do you buy that?

RAYMOND:: Absolutely, I buy that, because that's how I practiced the trade. It's kind of that saying, 'Don't believe your lying eyes. Listen what I have to tell you.' So yes, I do believe that. In the New Hampshire contest, there are a lot of things I don't believe, but the two emotional moments are what I do believe helped her win.

ALTERNET: What don't you believe?

RAYMOND:: Well, I didn't believe the polling. As a rule of thumb, I believe in polling, absolutely. I just didn't believe that the polling numbers that were being reported in the press were accurate. If you think about it, she went from being up by 6 (percent) to down by 13 (percent) and then winning by 3 (percent). That's a 19-point swing in one direction and a 21 point swing in the other, and I just don't believe that.

ALTERNET: You wrote that winning is more about dividing voters than uniting voters. Can you explain that?

RAYMOND:: Most of your readers will remember that George Bush said that "I'm a uniter, not a divider." But if you look at most presidential elections, they are won with pluralities. They are not even won with majorities. I think President Clinton won in '92 with something like 48 percent. So, that's not even a majority. So you can't be claiming to be uniting anybody when you don't even have a majority. That's one aspect of that.

The other aspect of that is what people commonly know as polarization, wedge issues. These are issues that incite people to vote on an emotional level. Often times in a survey you look for that wedge issue that gets a positive response, or the response you are looking for, from at least 60 percent of the electorate or those surveyed. And what that means is that's an overwhelming good issue.

So, for instance, if you said, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for candidate A if you knew that he had been indicted for embezzlement?" Well, I'd be less likely. Probably 75 percent of the people would say that. Well, there's your issue. And that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that maybe candidate A is also the best candidate for other reasons. That cancels all things out.

See more stories tagged with: allen raymond, rnc, gop, election fraud, election rigging, how to rig an election

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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