After phone service at 11 local campaign offices went down yesterday afternoon, prompting fears of a 2002-style sabotage, the New Hampshire Democratic Party now says service is back up.
The party’s executive director, Mike Brunelle, tells TPMmuckraker that phone service at the party’s call banks is “almost fully operational.”
Last night, both the Dems and the state Republican Party said they were having trouble making phone calls. The Democrats said they alerted the attorney general out of caution. In 2002, Republicans blocked the Dems’ get-out-the-vote efforts by having telemarketers jam the phone lines. Two Republicans were convicted.
Comcast blamed the outages — which affected swaths of New Hampshire and Massachusetts — on political robocalls. As of this morning, the phone company did not know who was making the automated calls.
Brunelle said his party has made no robocalls. A spokesman for the Republicans said their service is also back up, and noted that the party is only using live calls in its “final push” to get out the vote.
The Massachusetts Democrats, likewise, told the Boston Globe the robocalls weren’t from them.
In a year of record-breaking independent expenditures, however, the robocalls could have come from almost anywhere.
Brunelle said his party will focus today on getting out the vote, but will come back to the phone issue after the election to investigate whether anything nefarious happened.
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