The Orlando Sentinel reports on how things are going down in Florida, our nation's capital for electoral mayhem (and that's a pic of the patron saint of Florida elections, former Secretary of State Katherine Harris, to the left there):

Sheneka McDonald spent 10 minutes trying to convince poll workers ... that she should have a Democratic ballot. She questioned poll workers when she was handed a Republican ballot but was told, "this is the only ballot we have."

"I said, 'How can this be the only ballot,'" McDonald recalled. "That's when the guy chimed in from the back and said the Democratic primary was in March."

The poll captain eventually apologized to McDonald and told her they had forgotten to unpack all the ballots. "It was a little unnerving this morning," she said. "I don't see how you forget to unpack ballots. This is what gives Florida its reputation."

Note to Florida election workers: Although Florida has been stripped of its delegates, there is most certainly a Democratic primary today.

And TPM Reader KH writes in to tell the story of one man's triumph against incredible odds:

I voted in Lee County, Florida this morning - being in Southwest Florida, its a Republican stronghold in the state. The poll worker who opened the door for me advised "Just show your driver's license to the desk and you can vote." Only problem is that this is patently untrue, Florida providing for casting of provisional ballots and all. When I told the nice lady at the registration desk that I had lost my wallet and was going to cast a provisional ballot, she gave me the perplexed look of the uninformed. Fortunately, there was a gentleman at the "special services" desk who knew what to do and he got me on my way to voting. Then he told me that I had to "contact the supervisor of elections and provide proof of my right to vote or they will not count my ballot." Sigh. This also is not true in Florida - no proof is required if the only basis for casting the provisional was the lack of proper identification. The supervisor is suppose to run the driver's license number provided (which I gave them) against the state database and when they match the vote is counted.

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Freedom's Watch, the billionaire-fueled and highly-connected conservative attack machine, has begun its promised push to recruit membership -- to become "a conservative answer to MoveOn." But they're doing it in a funny way.

In a mailing that the group has sent to an unknown number of people, a four-page fundraising pitch (which is addressed, "Dear Fellow Patriot") is packaged with a two-page "Citizens Census." The "CONFIDENTIAL CENSUS DOCUMENT," as it's described in the letter, is actually a list of questions about core conservative issues, such as "Should we give our troops everything they need to fight our enemies?" with "Yes," "No," or "Undecided" as the offered responses. The questions are under the heading "FREEDOM'S WATCH CITIZENS CENSUS QUESTIONS."

When I asked Freedom's Watch spokesman Jake Suski whether the mailing was misleading, he strongly disagreed. "It doesn't even have the qualities of an official document," he argued, adding that the survey itself has multiple references to Freedom's Watch (true), that the fundraising pitch is written on Freedom's Watch letterhead (also true), and that the envelope itself says "Freedom's Watch" on it (true, on the back - see above for the front). "There's just no confusion about it. I think it's all in your head."

Well, here's the letter and "census" and here's the envelope it came in. Decide for yourself. It certainly reminds me of another fundraising pitch with an official aura: the "voter audit" letter from the Republican National Committee we reported on last August.

Suski, who was until last summer John McCain's Western finance director, wouldn't disclose how many such letters the group sent out or to whom it had been targeted. He would only say that "the response has been tremendous."

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And ... into Florida. The Mike Huckabee-supporting push poll group Common Sense Issues has stormed further south. The group's executive director Patrick Davis tells me that they planned to call "over 2.5 million homes" in Florida before the weekend. They'll also be calling "close to 200,000" homes in Missouri in anticipation of Super Tuesday. That will put the group's total calls this election so far at nearly 8.5 million.

When I asked Davis if he thought that the calls had helped Huckabee in South Carolina, considering the outcome and the negative press about the calls, he said "absolutely." Though "we would have liked to come out on top," he said, the calls "helped to define the issues for the voters making the decisions and differentiating between each candidate."

To refresh your memory, the calls are done in a poll format. Davis let me listen to the Florida call.

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A couple of days ago, a group called Citizens United Not Timid filed papers with the IRS as a "527" organization. Then we saw that Roger Stone had signed on as the group's "assistant treasurer." Uh oh.

Stone, regular TPM readers know, is a Republican operative who prides himself as something of an elder statesman of GOP dirty tricks. He went to work for Richard Nixon at age nineteen, making him the "youngest Watergate dirty trickster." He continues to idolize the man, even sporting a tattoo of Nixon's face between his shoulder blades. On his website, the StoneZone, he proudly touts Nixon's endorsement of him as "one of the very few excellent political professionals."

His career with the GOP took off from there, leading to spots with Ronald Reagan's campaigns, Bob Dole's presidential campaign, two of Sen. Arlen Specter's (R-PA) campaigns (Specter reportedly counts him as a friend), among others. James Baker tapped him to lead street protests in Florida to shut down the recount in 2000. Most recently, he was hired by New York Republicans for their battle with Gov. Elliot Spitzer (D), a gig that exploded when he was accused of making a threatening phone call to Spitzer's 83 year-old father (Stone denied it).

So what's Stone up to? Fortunately, he laid the whole scheme out to The Weekly Standard.

It's this simple: it's all about the group's acronym, which, used in conjunction with Hillary Clinton, is supposed to be irresistibly humorous. That is the beginning and the end of it. The group will not be running ads in any form and will not be making any robocalls. They'll be making T-shirts. That's it. You can buy them for $25 on their website:

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More about those calls. I spoke to Robert Morrow by phone just now, and he confirmed to me that he'd been making automated phone calls into South Carolina. "Absolutely," he said. But when I asked how many South Carolinians he'd called, he wouldn't say.

He also said that he himself was responsible for the calls, not any group that he'd formed. "I'm a grassroots activist. My efforts come from Robert Morrow." He also wouldn't tell me how much the calls had cost or who had done them for him, because he didn't "want the opposition to know." When I asked if he could do them from home, he only said "you can if you want to."

I also asked if he planned to make more calls in South Carolina or other states, and he said he "might."

He helpfully forwarded the call script, which he read on the calls himself, and I've pasted it below. "It's very important to understand that everything I say and email you I back up with facts," he told me.

So far, we've been contacted by four TPM readers who received the calls, and a commenter to my last post, "Jerry," also got one. We'll be posting the audio of the call sent in by TPM Reader RW momentarily.

Update: Here it is:

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We've gotten reports from two TPM readers in South Carolina that they received a negative robo call this morning about Hillary Clinton. Here's TPM reader RB's description:

I am listening to a robocall smear against Hillary Clinton repeating all kinds of rumors from the Bill Clinton years, like an FBI agent said on inauguration day that Hillary Clinton was in a fury--screaming and ranting because she couldn’t have Al Gore’s office, “when Bill dropped his pants” with Monica Lewisky and his “harem in the White House,” she had “affairs with Vince Foster,” etc. The call repeats “Can you trust her?” over and over. Says things like Hillary treats women like they are “invisible.”

Caller ID said the number was “unavailable,” but at the end of the call, the voice says, “Robert Morrow on behalf of everybody who has been violated by Hillary and Bill…Hillary sure says a lot of things, but can you trust her…”

TPM Reader SB also got a call from a Robert Morrow this morning, which he described this way: "This morning we got a robocall -- recorded message -- about Hillary Clinton. It talked about Vincent Foster and about cats." The caller ID said "out of area," he says.

So who is Robert Morrow? And how many calls should South Carolinians expect from him?

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We spent a good deal of time in the 2006 elections tracking the activity of third party groups on the right, groups with anonymous names like the Economic Freedom Fund. Funded by the most part by millionaire home-builder (and former Swift Boat patron) Bob Perry, the groups swooped in to attack Dem candidates throughout the country, airing radio, TV, and print ads and calling hundreds of thousands of voters with push polls.

But Perry only gave about $9 million to such groups that year. Freedom's Watch, with its close White House connections and network of Bob Perrys, is a whole new breed.

The group aims to raise and spend approximately $250 million for the 2008 cycle, a vast amount of money they apparently plan to use not only on the presidential election, but to greater effect in numerous House and Senate races throughout the country, where six figures can go a long way.

To review the White House connections: the group is headed by Bradley Blakeman, a former Bush White House official, Mel Sembler, a millionaire former Bush admbassador to Italy, and Ari Fleischer, who serves as the group's spokesman. Much of its support so far has come from Sembler and casino magnate and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the sixth richest person in the world. (The group intends to "broaden its base" as time goes on, Fleischer says.) The group got off the ground with a $15 million effort to support the president's surge strategy in August, but it's sticking around for the long haul.

The Washington Post headlines its takeout on the group "A Conservative Answer to MoveOn." To which the founder responds:

Wes Boyd, who co-founded MoveOn.org with his wife in their home in Berkeley, Calif., said the two groups are fundamentally different because his liberal organization was set up outside the influence of Democratic Party operatives and is funded primarily by small-dollar donors around the country.

Freedom's Watch, on the other hand, is "doing attack ads by Beltway operatives, financed by billionaires, at the request of the White House," Boyd said by e-mail. "MoveOn helps millions of real people get engaged and be heard and is solely funded by these same people."

Whether Freedom's Watch is the right's MoveOn or not -- and at least for now the comparison is silly -- they're sure to be a major factor in the elections this year. A special election in December showed how:

Adelson personally wrote an $80,000 check to Freedom's Watch on Dec. 7... just four days before the election that gave Republican Robert Latta the House seat representing the district around Bowling Green. Behind a blood-red foreground, the group's ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and "liberals in Congress" of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants....

After Latta won, the DCCC chairman, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), issued a memo warning fellow Democrats about the new independent group gunning for them. Van Hollen's campaign committee has $31 million, compared with $2.3 million for the Republicans' committee, but he is deeply concerned that independent groups on the right are now engaged in congressional races while liberal groups are focused on the presidential race.

When it comes to political money, "there's a whole other universe out there," Van Hollen said he told Democrats. "Don't get lulled into a false sense of security."

South Carolina already had the reputation as a key forum for dirty campaign tricks before 2000. It was, after all, the home of Lee Atwater. But 2000, with its variety of smears distributed by push polls, faxes, fliers, and emails, cemented it.

But you got South Carolina all wrong, Tucker Eskew, George W. Bush's campaign spokesman in 2000, wants you to know. In this interview shot for the forthcoming documentary on Atwater, Boogie Man, Eskew, an Atwater protege, objects to the idea that racist smears work there:

It's "an insult" and "unfair to suggest that a state like South Carolina is a bunch of rubes because of our past," he says. So why would the Bush campaign have gotten involved in something like that? The McCain illegitimate black baby smear was "just some crazy rumor that some one person may have spread." And as for the impact, maybe "a few hundred people" may have been affected -- a "few rubes." Certainly not the payoff that a campaign genius like Karl Rove (another Atwater protege) would waste time with.

From the necessarily spotty reporting on what really happened in 2000, however, it's apparent that the rubes were out in force that year, distributing fliers about McCain's "Negro child" and running phone banks to push that and other rumors. So far, this election seems very tame by comparison.

On the one hand, Mike Huckabee really is in a bind.

Common Sense Issues is calling millions of voters and telling them that John McCain wants to allow experiments on unborn babies and that Fred Thompson supports partial-birth abortion. He can't do anything to stop it. And in a deft bit of spin, he says the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is at fault -- so it's John McCain's fault that Huckabee can't stop the group from smearing McCain.

He's criticized the calls, said he "wished they would stop," and now has gone so far as to tell NPR, "I personally wish all of this were outlawed." (He didn't mention that the calls actually are illegal under state law in South Carolina.)

On the other hand, from what the group has disclosed, it's apparent that most, if not all, of its major donors also support Huckabee.

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Anticipating the 2008 election, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced a bill to ban "vote caging," the term for a time-tested GOP vote suppression technique.

To "cage" voters, operatives send out a mass mailing with "do not forward" labels. Those names attached to addresses that bounce back are put on a challenge list, which is then used to challenge those voters when they come to the polls. GOPers in states all over the country have used the technique for decades, especially targeting mostly African-American areas. Timothy Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who replaced one of the fired prosecutors in Arkansas, was forced to defend his role in an alleged 2004 caging scheme when he worked for the Republican National Committee.

A number of powerful senators are backing a similar bill in the Senate, including Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

You can read the text of Conyers' bill here. A bullet point summary provided by his office is below.

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This is certainly the nastiest line we've heard in the push polls going out to about a million South Carolinians. Respondents who say that they're supporting John McCain are told "Fact: McCain voted to allow scientific experiments to be done on unborn children." (Thanks to TPM Reader NC for flagging this for us.)

Patrick Davis, the executive director of Common Sense Issues, the group that's been paying for the automated calls, confirmed to me that such a line is used in the script: "He's in favor of stem cell research. That's the issue."

The medical experiments on unborn babies line is actually an old favorite of the group -- they used it in 2006 against now Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), when he was running against GOPer Michael Steele.

Update: The New York Times reports on another line in the calls:

The call first asked whom the listener was supporting in the primary. If the listener said Mr. McCain, the automated voice said that not only did Mr. McCain support research on “unborn babies,” but that in writing the McCain-Feingold bill tightening rules on campaign donations, Mr. McCain had created “the most restrictive assault on free speech ever passed in America.”

The call referred to the bill as the “McCain-Feingold-Thompson law,” evidently because Mr. Thompson had also backed it.

"McCain camp goes on offense in S.C." headlines the Los Angeles Times. "McCain Takes the Fight To Negative Opponents" echoes the Washington Post.

The campaign is doing its best to show that it won't let 2000 happen again, when still unknown dirty tricksters called South Carolina voters to ask them whether they knew that McCain had illegitimately fathered a black baby. But so far, the campaign's response to the attacks has been far more notable than the attacks themselves.

As we've been amply documenting here, McCain has indeed been the target of push polls this time around, but so have his opponents Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson -- with the notable exception of Mike Huckabee. The calls, numbering around seven million so far in various primary states, are the work of the Huck-supporting group Common Sense Issues, and the attacks are pretty standard GOP negative fare so far.

And then there's Vietnam Veterans against John McCain. Recently, the group sent a mailer to approximately 80 newspaper editors in South Carolina accusing McCain of selling out his fellow POWs in Vietnam. On Tuesday, the McCain campaign (which is working hard to appeal to vet voters) made one of McCain's former fellow POWs available to the media to respond to the smear. The story, picked up by the AP and Wall Street Journal among others, got national play -- undoubtedly more play than the group would have been able to get on its own.

I spoke to the founder of Vietnam Veterans against John McCain, Jerry Kiley, yesterday. He told me that the group hasn't "actively sought donations at this point," and that the next step for the group will be mailings "going out to our network," with the intention that the mailing would then be forwarded on to local media there. The group just doesn't have the funds to send mailings directly to voters -- nor, as they declared they would in their statement of purpose, to run radio and TV ads. Things "could change," he told me, "if we received a sizable donation," but he wasn't holding out much hope.

Instead, they're planning "an email campaign." Groups of like-minded vets throughout the country will get the email chain started, he said, "so it will spread very quickly throughout the country."

So they're not exactly the second coming of the well-funded Swift Boat Vets (one of whom said he was "appalled" by their attack on McCain). They don't have $22 million to spend. But they are certainly admirers -- even making an homage in their South Carolina mailing. As we pointed out yesterday, the mailing had a label with the Swift Boat Vets' icon on it. But we couldn't figure out if it said Swift Boat Vets for Truth or Swift Boot Vets for Truth:

The winner, Kiley, told me, is Swift Boot Vets. "We actually named ourselves the Swift Boot Vets because we want to boot McCain out of the primary."

Update: Here's video of McCain responding to the mailers on Fox News:

A number of TPM readers have written in with descriptions of the pro-Huckabee push polls done by Common Sense Issues, and we had a very good idea of how they went. But it helps to hear one. Luckily, one South Carolinian was able to record the latter half of the call, and Jeffrey Taylor, blogging at Reason, posted a link (wav).

We've transcribed the call below. Unfortunately, the man who recorded it missed the beginning, but here's how that would have gone. A male voice says "this is a call from Election Research with a 45-second survey" (sometimes it's from "Data Research" -- they're both names used by the calling firm, ccAdvertising). The voice then asks who you support. If you say Fred Thompson, you get a slew of reasons why Thompson is not half the man Mike Huckabee is. The transcription shows how that goes.

Now, there seems to be a specific question about state politicians at the end of each call that varies from state to state. In the example below, it's about Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). In the Nevada calls, voters who said they had a favorable view of Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) were asked what they thought about Reid wanting to surrender in Iraq and hand over our freedoms to "Islamo-fascists."

Again, we'd love to hear other recordings. So if you manage to get one, please email it in to tips(at)tpmmuckraker.com.

The transcription:

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We've been tracking Common Sense Issues, the Mike Huckabee-supporting push polling group, closely (click here to see our past coverage). They've already made millions of calls and last night, they unleashed another onslaught on South Carolina, where they'll call a million homes over three days. All told, that means they've made approximately 6 million calls so far this election (see update below).

The group's executive director told me that they're "well within the law." But one thing that hasn't been clear is whether any of the states will call the group's bluff and prosecute them.*

South Carolina has a law against automated phone calls. And the state's attorney general, Henry McMaster, is co-chair of John McCain's state campaign. In a phone interview today, he told me that his office was still gathering information about the calls, but that "I'd advise anybody making automated calls that they should get some legal advice."

The state's law carries a potential civil penalty of $1000 per call, McMaster said, meaning that the state could hypothetically seek a $1 billion penalty (see update below). "It takes much less than that to put a hurting on most folks," he added.

McMaster is a member of the McCain's so-called "Truth Squad," an effort by the campaign to counter negative attacks, and the campaign released a statement from him earlier today responding to the "several misleading claims" about McCain in Common Sense Issues' push polls. When I asked him whether it might be a conflict of interest for him to pursue a case against a group backing a rival candidate, he said no: "It doesn’t make any difference who we’re supporting or not supporting. In my state, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small place. You just have to be ethical and do your job and overlook those kind of things."

*Note: The firm that's been doing the calls on Common Sense Issues' behalf is ccAdvertising (also known as FreeEats.com). And their legal record isn't encouraging. That company has already lost twice in federal court. In 2004, they challenged North Dakota's do-not-call law and lost (they'd made approximately 235,000 calls polling a range of GOP hot-button issues). The company was fined $20,000. And in 2006, they challenged Indiana's do-not-call law and lost (the group made 400,000 calls attacking Rep. Byron Hill (D-IN)).

Thursday Update: It's been hard to get a handle on just how many calls the group has been making, but the group's executive director gave me an estimate of approximately 5 million this morning. That's based on his count of 850,000 in Iowa, 400,000 in New Hampshire, 3 million in Michigan, approximately 50,000 in Florida, over 1 million in South Carolina and approximately 500,000 in Nevada. This post originally gave an estimate of 7 million based on earlier numbers provided by Davis.

The post originally estimated a maximum penalty of $2 billion based on there being roughly 2 million calls in the state. But Davis would only characterize it as "over 1 million."

Is the ragtag Vietnam Veterans against John McCain giving swift boating a bad name?

Yes, said Swift Boat Veterans and POW’s for Truth treasurer Weymouth Symmes. "I don't think there's any truth to that at all. He was a hero, in my opinion. I'd be appalled if anybody questioned his war service."

The reason I asked is that the anti-McCain group seems to be piggybacking on the Swift Boat Vets in their recent mailer, which was sent out to 80 newspaper editors. (For a quick summary of the group's attack and McCain's response, see the AP.)

In the mailer (above), you can see the icon for the Swift Boat Vets for Truth in the lower left hand corner. But Symmes said that the real Swift Boat Vets isn't affiliated with the group -- or any group active in the 2008 race. In fact, he'd never even heard of the group, adding "they must be a pretty small and obscure group, I would guess."

In fact, on closer inspection, the Swift Boat Vets icon has a North Carolina address, the same as the anti-McCain vet group. And we've been having an internal debate here at TPM whether, in a possible precaution against charges of infringement, it actually says Swift Boot Vets for Truth:

We've been playing phone tag with Jerry Kiley, one of the founders of the group, and hope to speak to him later this afternoon to sort all this out.

As for the size of the group and it's supporters, it's not clear. They filed papers with the FEC last February and March establishing the group, announcing in a statement of purpose that "We will collect donations to pay for a web site, radio and TV ads exposing John McCain only (negative advertizing). We are completely independant (sic) and not connected to any political organization. All of the money collected will be used for the express purpose of defeating John McCain.” But they've reported no contributions since then, even failing to file the required mid-year report, which won them a chiding letter from the FEC.

Kiley, along and another Vietnam vet, Ted Sampley, who's part of the effort, also ran a Vietnam Veterans against John Kerry website in 2004. They've also been after McCain for a while; they registered the Vietnam Veterans against John McCain website back in 2005.

Sampley* has quite a history with McCain, going back to the 1980's, even getting into a fight with McCain's longtime aide Mark Salter. Here's an account from a long piece in the Phoenix New Times back in 1999:

*Update/Correction: This post originally said that Sampley is an Arizona resident -- he's actually in North Carolina. Another of the group's founders, Earl Hopper, is in Arizona.

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5 million calls and counting.

The push polling group supporting Mike Huckabee, Common Sense Issues, has added Nevada to their list of target states in a big way. They've made over 300,000 calls there, the group's executive director Patrick Davis* told me, and plan to "call every household in the state" (there were approximately 750,000 households in the state as of the 2000 census).

The automated calls fit the same model as those in the other primary states -- South Carolina (over a million), Iowa (850,000), New Hampshire (800,000), Michigan (2,000,000), Florida (hundreds of thousands, though less than a million) --, where a voice asks the voter which candidate he/she supports, and then goes on to provide a battery of facts meant to demonstrate why Huckabee is preferable. Davis told me that the calls frequently begin with "this is a call from Election Research with a 45-second survey."

As Nevada journalist Steve Friess writes on his blog, he got a call from the group Sunday evening. After saying that he supports Giuliani, he was informed that Giuliani supports gay marriage and "sanctuary cities" for immigrants and that Huckabee is a lifetime hunter. That's substantially similar to what a TPM reader reported from Michigan.

There seems to be a specifically Nevadan component, though. Friess says that the call asked if he had a favorable view of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).... "After I answered, the voice says something to the effect of what I think of the fact that Reid wants to surrender in Iraq and hand over our freedoms to Islamo-fascists." When I asked Davis if that was an accurate characterization of the call, he said "yes."

The group will go up with a TV ad in Michigan tonight and into tomorrow, Davis said, saying that the it wasn't a very large buy -- in the range of less than $50,000. It's the same ad that the group ran in Iowa, which you can see on their website, TrustHuckabee.com.

*Update/Correction: This post originally referred to the group's executive director as Rick Davis. His name is Patrick.

Yesterday we gave you the rundown on Common Sense Issues, a nonprofit group that's been phoning millions of voters in key primary states on behalf of Mike Huckabee. The automated calls ask voters about their views on certain hot-button conservative issues and then provide a barrage of facts demonstrating that Huckabee is stronger.

I spoke with the group's executive director Patrick Davis this morning and asked him to lay it all out for me. Where was the group active? How many calls had they made? And were the calls illegal?

In addition to the approximately 850,000 calls in Iowa and 1 million in South Carolina, the group made 800,000 in New Hampshire, and already hundreds of thousands in Florida (he said it wasn't up to a million "yet"). They're on the phones currently in Michigan, he said, and have reached on the order of two million homes. All the calls are generally identical, he said, with some exceptions.

For instance, the group is calling independent and Democratic homes in Michigan, encouraging them to cross over and vote for Huckabee in the Republican primary because "they don't have much of a choice on their ballot," Davis explained. A commenter to yesterday's post, ROSS in Detroit, said he'd received one of these calls, writing:

"I'm in MI near Detroit. My ZIP Code is heavily Dem. I just got one of the push poll robocalls described. It urged me as a Democrat to cross over and vote in the GOP primary for Huckabee! It was immediately clear at the beginning of the 2 min 45 sec call that this was in favor of Huckabee. . . . ."

See below for another description of the calls by another TPM reader.

Davis defended the calls, saying that the group's activities were "well within federal law." And he repeated the group's explanation as for why these weren't push polls (imitations of polls meant to disperse negative information). Every call is unique, he said, because of the group's "personal identification artificial intelligence" technology. And "every bit of it is factual."

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It's not much of a mystery which candidate the nonprofit group Common Sense Issues supports. After all, they run a website called Trust Huckabee. And they've made millions of calls in key primary states on Mike Huckabee's behalf.

From the various reports, the automated calls are transparent examples of push polls -- i.e. calls posing as polls, but really intended to give negative information about a particular candidate.

Common Sense has some considerable experience with this. In the 2006 elections, the group paid for calls attacking Democrats in at least five states. The robo calls followed their favored formula -- extremely leading questions followed by a barrage of "facts." In Maryland, voters were asked whether they supported medical research experiments on unborn babies. In Tennessee, voters were asked "Would you prefer to have your taxes not raised, and if possible, cut?" and then "Do you believe that foreign terrorists should have the same legal rights and privileges as American citizens?" You can listen to one of the Tennessee calls here. Always, the "facts" based on the voter's response.

When I talked to one of the leaders of the group, he told me that the questions used "accurate characterizations," and added: "There are a fair number of things that are unpleasant to talk about, but that doesn't make [our questions] any less accurate."

The group doesn't mind pushing the envelope. Since December, they've paid for calls supporting Huckabee in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina; because they are robo calls, they've been able to reach hundreds of thousands of households (1 million in South Carolina and Michigan each, and approximately 850,000 in Iowa). Florida is apparently next. The group also ran a TV ad in Iowa which you can see on their website called "Who Can You Trust?" Just in case voters didn't get the message, they were directed to CannotTrustMittRomney.com, which includes a series of old TV clips of Romney proclaiming his pro-choice stance.*

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Pretty much as expected, with Judge Anthony Kennedy as the key swing vote. From the AP:

The Supreme Court appeared reluctant Wednesday to strike down the nation's strictest requirement that voters show photo identification before being allowed to cast a ballot....

"You want us to invalidate the statute because of minimal inconvenience?" Justice Anthony Kennedy said near the end of an hour-long argument. Kennedy, often a key vote, appeared more willing than some to consider changes to the law....

Chief Justice John Roberts, an Indiana native, and Justice Antonin Scalia indicated strong support for the state law. Justice Clarence Thomas said nothing, but most often votes with his conservative colleagues....

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg focused her questions on the difficulties for indigent voters who lack IDs. Why, she asked, can't the state allow those voters to sign the sworn statement on Election Day, which would eliminate the second trip to the county courthouse?

Told Indiana wants to avoid congestion at the polls, Ginsburg said the state wants to have it both ways because it argues relatively few people are affected by the law. "If there are so few of them, I don't understand why they should be put to the burden," Ginsburg said.

Here's a detailed rundown from SCOTUSblog.

We gave a rundown of the possible effects of the FEC's shutdown on the 2008 election last week. The Washington Post reports that until one side budges, the two remaining commissioners will show up in the meantime "to offer advice instead of binding decisions on questions from political campaigns."

Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether Indiana's voter ID law breaks the law. If a law disenfranchises thousands of voters (mostly poor and minorities) to prevent a phantom crime, is that ok?

Of course, it's rare to hear the Republican supporters of voter ID laws admit that there's no evidence that voter impersonation, the kind of voter fraud the laws are meant to stop, occurs.

But that's just what happened yesterday when Warren Olney of KCRW's To The Point pressed Todd Rokita (R), Indiana's secretary of state and a named defendant in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

Have any cases of voter impersonation been prosecuted in Indiana? was the simple question. And as Olney pressed, Rokita went from one fallback argument to another. It started with this revealing exchange:

Q: ...Have there been cases in Indiana where people represented themselves as somebody else in order to be able to vote?

Rokita: Oh yeah, we suspect it happens all the time.

Q: You suspect?

Rokita: Mm hmm.

Q: Have you got any cases proven?

Rokita: Well, are you saying you want to define whether or not there’s fraud based on whether or not it’s prosecuted? Is that the question?

From there, Rokita argued that there is fraud (it "exists almost on a daily basis"), but that it's nearly impossible to prosecute due to the ephemeral nature of the crime. And it tends not to be a priority for prosecutors due to all the other violent and horrible stuff they need to prosecute. And even if there hasn't been any such voter fraud (and I'm not saying that there isn't), we have a right to protect ourselves from it; "You have the right to build a firehouse before you get burned by the fire."

It bears mentioning here that the Justice Department under George Bush has indeed made prosecuting voter fraud a priority -- and came up empty. That fact hasn't stopped voter ID law proponents from claiming hundreds of demonstrated cases of voter fraud. It's quite a morass of innuendo, but the Brennan Center (which has filed an amicus brief with the law's opponents) undertook the staggering task of disproving every one of those claims one by one. It's a 75 page document (pdf).

The lawyers actually arguing the case before the court today are likely to be more eloquent than Rokita, but the arguments will essentially be the same. So take a look at the relevant excerpts from the interview below.

via Rick Hasen.

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From The Los Angeles Times:

Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said....

Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions....

"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media," he said. "It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits -- and who it is that eats them."

Right after last night's Republican Fox News debate, Frank Luntz appeared to demonstrate that, based on his focus group of New Hampshire Republicans, Mitt Romney was the big winner.

But as Josh pointed out, the group's unanimity of opinion and blind insistence on Romney's rout had a suspicious air to it.

Along those lines, a number of bloggers have pointed out that one man in the focus group actually appeared in a prior Luntz Fox News focus group four months prior. Both were gatherings in New Hampshire (at the same Manchester, New Hampshire restaurant, it appears) of approximately 30 New Hampshire voters -- according to the lead-in last night, Luntz's group were registered Republican undecideds. Although Luntz doesn't identify the man by name in both segments, he's easily identifiable through his appearance and voice -- either that, or he's got an identical twin.

While this isn't necessarily evidence that Luntz has used actors or plants in his segments, it "says there's something sloppy at best about his recruitment process, Mark Blumenthal, a veteran of the polling business and founder of Pollster.com, told me. "If you see a respondent show up twice, it's a sign of professional respondents leaking through."

But when I spoke to Luntz today, he said that he uses repeat participants by design. In a segment to air on Fox News tonight, he said, there should be a "bunch of people" who had been in prior focus groups, some of them participating as early as May of last year. "It allows me to see how people's opinion have changed over time," he explained. "I'm trying to isolate that moment that made the difference."

When asked about the charge that he'd used actors or plants, his already rapid speech accelerated: "That's ridiculous.... I'm sure that the person who said that doesn't have a PhD, probably doesn't have a masters, and doesn't know what they're talking about."

He's conducting a "study of human behavior" with his dial tests (a mechanism that registers viewers' moment by moment reaction) he said, not a traditional focus group. And if you "want to understand how people change their points of view, you have to ask them over time and multiple times. This is how social biologists do it. This is anthropology.... If you're goal is to study how opinions change over time, of course you've got to call them back."

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