MANCHESTER – The New Hampshire Democratic Party says the state and national Republican committees should pay it $4.1 million in damages for an illegal get-out-the-vote phone-jamming operation on Election Day 2002.

The Republicans call the figure untenable and say their admitted two-hour disruption of 13 Democratic telephone lines should cost them no more than $4,974, the costs of rental and service for the affected telephones.

But the Democrats want the Republicans to pay nearly half of the "value" of their entire get-out-the-vote effort from April 1 to Election Day. They say the phone-jam disrupted the operation at the crucial time that the product of seven months of incurred costs was being mobilized.

Superior Court Judge Philip Mangones will decide which side prevails as the two-year-old civil case moves toward a scheduled Dec. 4 trial date with competing expert testimony and much legal maneuvering.

The case centers on the well-publicized Republican operation that hired a telemarketer to place hundreds of hang-up calls to tie up get-out-the-vote and ride-to-the-polls phone banks at five state Democratic Party and a union headquarters on Election Day, 2002 €" the climax of a hotly contested U.S. Senate campaign between Republican John Sununu and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. The phone-jam was first made public by the New Hampshire Union Leader in February 2003 and has since received national media attention.

During a U.S. Justice Department investigation, two Republican operatives, including former Republican State Committee executive director Charles McGee, pleaded guilty to federal telephone harassment charges and served time in prison.

A national GOP operative, James Tobin, was found guilty of similar charges by a jury nearly a year ago and faces 10 months in prison but is free pending appeal. Last week, Shaun Hansen, the former owner of the Idaho-based telemarketing firm hired to place the hang-up calls, pleaded guilty to telephone harassment and conspiracy charges and is scheduled for sentencing on Feb. 20, 2007. He faces up to seven years in prison and a fine of $500,000.

The Democrats filed a civil suit against the state GOP in 2004 and later added defendants, including the Republican National Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee. In June, the judge dismissed five of the eight Democratic allegations, including a charge that the phone-jam denied New Hampshire residents their constitutional right to vote.

Mangones preserved a Democratic "trespass to chattels (items of property)" claim that Republicans intentionally and repeatedly interfered with the Democrats' lawful use of their telephone systems.

Republicans, in court motions and expert testimony, now say the Democrats are trying to inflate this simple trespass claim with artificial costs to compensate for the dismissal of their constitutional claim.

The Republicans are asking the judge to exclude from the trial any evidence of damages beyond the telephone system.

The Democrats counter that if the judge limits damage to the loss of telephone use, they would be prevented from presenting testimony showing the phone-jam to be a "catastrophic sabotage" with a broad impact.

"The appropriate measure of damages in this case is for the court to look at the scope of the harm suffered as a result of the trespass and then compute what it would have cost the plaintiff (Democratic Party) to repair the damage," a Democratic attorney wrote. "The best way to calculate the loss is to look at what the (Democratic Party) spent to set up its get-out-the-vote operations on election day and then determine the loss."

Kevin Arceneaux, an assistant political science professor at Temple University, issued written expert testimony that the Democrats spent $9.3 million on "field-related activities" from April 1, 2002 to election day. He reported that the phone-jam "derailed their plan and vitiated (impaired) the NHDP's ability to carry out a full and complete Election Day get-out-the-vote."

Arceneaux reasoned that the Democrats lost "four hours (or 44.4 percent) of get-out-the-vote work during the crucial nine-hour window" of 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. He then assessed the damages at 44.4 percent of the entire $9.3 million get-out-the-vote cost and arrived at $4,143,077.

The Republicans countered with two experts and asked the judge to throw out Arceneaux's testimony.

Jeffrey Milyo, an associate economics professor at the University of Missouri and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, charged that key elements in the Arceneaux report were "either false, exaggerated or unsupported." He said the phone-jam "most likely had a negligible direct impact on the Democrats get-out-the-vote efforts" and concluded that the damages "do not extend beyond the rental cost of the actual phone lines that were jammed, pro-rated by the amount of time that these phone lines were out of service," which, he noted, was actually two hours.

Dr. Padmanabhan Srinagesh, an economic and financial consultant, wrote that Arceneaux's estimate "does not comport with common sense" and estimated the damages "at no more than about $4,974," and "in no event" more than $21,287.

State GOP Chairman Wayne Semprini said in an interview last week that a pre-trial settlement is unlikely. "I'd expect that we're miles apart," he said.