Those recent robocalls to Democratic voters, featuring the voice and the conservative views of then-Republican Charlie Crist, have prompted Democrats to file a formal complaint with the Florida Elections Commission, the Tampa Bay Times reports.

Rick Hasen says Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) “joins the list of other politicians prosecuted under controversial or dubious theories, including Tom DeLay, John Edwards, Scott Walker, Don Siegelman, and Ted Stevens. Some go to jail; some don’t. Some get convicted by juries; some don’t. Some have their prosecutions overturned on appeal; some don’t.”

“The common thread here is the criminalization of politics.”

“The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources,” National Journal reports.

“The NRCC has created about two dozen of these new faux news sites targeting Democrats, both challengers and incumbents, and is promoting them across the country with localized Google search ads… The articles begin in the impartial voice of a political fact-checking site, hoping to lure in readers… Then they gradually morph into more biting language. At the very bottom, in a box, is the disclaimer that the NRCC paid for the site.”

“For the third time this year, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer is accusing Republicans of attempting to spy on his campaign,” the Detroit News reports.

“But this time, the suspected political subterfuge involves a high-tech hidden camera and a video memory disk that fell into the hands of Democrats.”

[Read more…]

“Republicans are defending a series of websites they established that appear to support Democratic candidates for Congress, but instead direct contributions to the GOP,” NBC News reports.

“The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) said its websites were not confusing, and accused Democrats of crying foul because their candidates were struggling.”

The Week: Republicans resort to trickery to outfox Democrats

“David Wildstein deserves an ass-kicking. Sorry. There, I said it.”

— Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich (D), quoted by the Newark Star Ledger, on the Port Authority official responsible creating traffic by closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge.

“Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, according to the head of the borough’s EMS department,” the Bergen Record reports.

“The woman later died, borough records show.”

Newark Star Ledger: “Democrats have long accused Republican Gov. Chris Christie of ordering the lane closures as political retribution for Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor refusing to endorse his re-election bid last year. Today, newly unveiled e-mails show that one of Christie’s top aides knew about the closures in advance. The governor himself has denied being involved and today issued a statement admonishing the aide.”

The Week: Is Chris Christie finished?

A mysterious group has been using a “push poll” in an attempt to dissuade South Carolina voters from voting for Elizabeth Colbert Busch in an upcoming congressional special election by alleging that she had an abortion and spent time in jail, Think Progress reports.

“The only reason that I came forward with what I knew was I was trying
to protect the Democratic Party. I believe in our party’s
values, and I was doing what I thought was best for the party because I
did not want their bad behavior, their poor mistakes… their lack of judgment to hurt our
party’s efforts here in the state Kentucky.”

— Democratic operative Jacob Conway, quoted by TPM, on why he outed a super PAC for recording a private strategy session with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

“Last week they were attacking my wife’s ethnicity and apparently also bugging my headquarters, much like Nixon and Watergate. That’s what the political left does these days.”

— Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), quoted by Roll Call.

“Robert Bork says President Richard Nixon promised him the next Supreme Court vacancy after Bork complied with Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973,” the AP reports.

“Bork’s recollection of his role in the Saturday Night Massacre that culminated in Cox’s firing is at the center of his slim memoir, Saving Justice, that is being published posthumously by Encounter Books. Bork died in December at age 85.”

Republicans in the Virginia Senate today “pushed through a surprise rewrite of the 2011 redistricting plan that erases a Democratic seat in western Virginia,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.

The revised plan cleared the Senate on a party-line vote of 20-19 as Sen. Henry Marsh (D), a 79-year old civil rights veteran, was attending President Obama’s inauguration ceremony.

Democrats “were shocked by the move, vowing to oppose the new plan in court.”

Reuters reports on the uptick in efforts to mislead, intimidate or pressure voters as we head towards Election Day.

In addition to billboards warning against voter fraud and employers pushing workers to vote a certain way, in Florida, Virginia and Indiana, voters have received phone calls that wrongly told them there was no need to cast a ballot in person on Election Day because they could vote by phone.

Meanwhile, a probe of similar phone calls in Indiana has focused on a firm called Vote USA, but it is unclear who was behind the group because its phone number is no longer active.

ABC News/Univision: “A series of billboards placed in poor, minority neighborhoods in Cleveland telling people that voter fraud is a felony have reignited concerns over voter intimidation and suppression tactics in key battleground states.”

Justin Lamar Sternad (D), whose failed congressional campaign became the subject of a federal grand-jury investigation, has told the FBI that Rep. David Rivera (R-FL) was secretly behind his run for office, the Miami Herald reports.

Sternad’s account to federal authorities supports what two campaign vendors said, that the congressman was the driver behind a botched attempt to plant a candidate in the district’s congressional primary.

Rep. Michael Grimm’s (R-NY) campaign office on Staten Island was allegedly vandalized and burglarized overnight, Politicker reports.

Staffers arrived at the office this morning to discover multiple windows that had apparently been broken with cement blocks but “upon further investigation, the NYPD discovered computers inside the office had their hard drives erased.

A Grimm spokesman said the campaign “does believe this is politically motivated.”

Former GOP operative Roger Stone tells New York magazine he thinks politics has gotten a lot less interesting since his days as a Nixon campaign staffer, mainly because there are “fewer and fewer” dirty tricks.

Said Stone of the Romney campaign: “They don’t even have any clean tricks. I don’t know how you run a one-dimensional campaign.”

West New York Mayor Felix Roque (D) was arrested by the FBI “on charges of illegally hacking into a website associated with a recall movement, while attempting to tap into e-mails to find who might be plotting against him,” the Newark Star Ledger reports. Rogue’s son was also arrested.

“According to a criminal complaint filed under seal and released following the arrests, the two men are charged with an electronic dirty tricks campaign in an effort to disrupt and kill the recall movement… Details in the complaint show the two men were playing hardball, in a place where politics is always a life and death struggle against competing Democratic factions.”