Attorney General Patrick Lynch, who dropped out of the Democratic gubernatorial primary in July to clear the way for Frank Caprio, is coming to his former rival’s aid on the eve of Election Day.

Lynch recorded a robocall – an automated phone message – that’s getting distributed this afternoon and was forwarded to me by one of the recipients. As you can see, it’s not easy to critique two other candidates and make the affirmative case for your own man in a 30-second message:

Hello. This is Attorney General Patrick Lynch, and I’m calling to ask you to vote for my friend, Frank Caprio, Democrat for governor, this Tuesday. Frank Caprio has a plan to get our economy moving again, and Rhode Island needs just that. We can’t afford Chafee’s plan to raise taxes on working families and we need to put an end to the failed Republican policies of the last 16 years. We need a Democrat in the governor’s office, and that Democrat is Frank Caprio. Please vote for Frank this Tuesday. Thank you.

Question: Do robocalls actually work?

Update: The same individual has now received a robocall from Frank Caprio himself. Unfortunately, Caprio’s message started playing while my correspondent’s outgoing message was still playing, so part of the message was cut off. But from context clues, it appears Frank Caprio wants people to vote for him tomorrow.

Update #2: My correspondent has now received a third Caprio robocall in the space of a few hours. This time it was Bill Clinton on his behalf. I can say that in this person’s case, the three robocalls has not made him more amenable to voting for the Democrat tomorrow.

That said, I shouldn’t pick on the Caprio campaign too much – they may just have the bad luck of robocalling somebody who emailed a reporter. Is Robitaille robocalling? Chafee? Ken Block? Joe Lusi? Let me know in comments.