Democratic officials in Arizona asked federal and state authorities late Sunday to investigate robocalls from Republican Jeff Flake’s Senate campaign that told registered Democrats to vote at the wrong polling locations.
Brahm Resnik of Phoenix television station KPNX first reported on the calls on Sunday, interviewing a Democrat named Mary Crecco and at least six other Democratic voters who received them. Crecco said she believed she was purposefully told to go to the wrong polling location miles away from the correct one because she is a Democrat.
But Flake’s campaign responded on Monday morning, saying it placed 120,000 robocalls this weekend targeting Republicans, not Democrats. A news release said campaign volunteers received fewer than a dozen calls questioning the information that was provided. In some cases, the statement said, adult children were registered at their parents’ address while in other cases voters had moved but had not updated their registration.
“Had KPNX provided us with detailed information on their report prior to airing it, we could have informed them that the Democrat they interviewed received the call because, according the voting records, she had the same phone number as a Republican who lives in the precinct we provided information for,” Flake said in the statement. “Again, this autodial was targeted to Republicans. Any Democrats who received the call (which in all likelihood was a small number) did so because of errant information in the database owing to circumstances like those detailed above.”
D.B. Mitchell, a spokesman for the Arizona Democratic Party, told TPM that party officials sent complaints to the Arizona Secretary of State, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.
The Polltracker Average currently shows Flake leading his Democratic opponent Richard Carmona 51 to 46 percent.
Mitchell provided TPM with a copy of the robocall left on Crecco’s answering machine. It is embedded below.
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