McCain campaign asks New Hampshire attorney general to investigate anti-Romney calls

CONCORD, N.H. — Republican John McCain is asking the New Hampshire attorney general to investigate phone calls to voters that pretend to be polls but raise questions about rival candidate Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith — and make favorable statements about McCain.

McCain's campaign says it had nothing to do with the calls but fears voters will think it did.

The telephone effort "was made to appear to be friendly to Senator McCain, but we had nothing to do with the poll at the state or national level," campaign vice chairman Chuck Douglas wrote in a letter asking the attorney general's office to investigate and tell the callers to stop.

McCain himself said Friday at a campaign stop in Colorado, "It is disgraceful, it is outrageous, and it is a violation, we believe, of New Hampshire law." He urged other candidates to join him in the legal action and referred to Romney as a "decent man."

Western Wats, a Utah-based company, placed the calls that initially sound like a poll but then pose questions that cast Romney in a harsh light, according to people who received the calls. In politics, this type of phone surveying is called "push polling" — contacting potential voters and asking questions intended to plant a message, usually negative, rather than gauging attitudes.

A spokesman for the company would not comment on whether it made the calls. "Western Wats has never, currently does not, nor will it ever engage in push polling," its client services director, Robert Maccabee, said in a statement released Thursday night.

The 20-minute calls started on Sunday in New Hampshire and Iowa. At least seven people in the two early voting states received the calls.

Among the questions was whether the person receiving the call knew that Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney's faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.

"It started out like all the other calls. ... Then all of the sudden it got very unsettling and very negative," said Anne Baker, an independent voter from Hollis, N.H.