Suspicious voter registration forms found in 10 Florida counties

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LATimes.com said:
WASHINGTON — Florida elections officials said Friday that at least 10 counties have identified suspicious and possibly fraudulent voter registration forms turned in by a firm working for the Republican Party of Florida, which has filed an election fraud complaint with the state Division of Elections against its one-time consultant.

The controversy in Florida -- which began with possibly fraudulent forms that first cropped up in Palm Beach County -- has engulfed the Republican National Committee, which admitted Thursday that it urged state parties in seven swing states to hire the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting.The RNC paid the company at least $3.1 million -- routed through the state parties of Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia -- to register voters and run get-out-the-vote operations. Wisconsin and Ohio had not yet paid the firm for get-out-the-vote operations it was contracted to do.

The RNC severed its ties to the firm Thursday after questions arose about the work Strategic Allied did in Palm Beach County, where election officials have turned over to prosecutors 106 voter registration forms submitted by one worker, some of which contained apparent forgeries and other problems.

Now elections officials across Florida are scrutinizing voter registration forms turned in to their counties on behalf of the state Republican Party. The state elections division is also investigating.

Florida GOP officials – who said they hired Strategic Allied at the request of the RNC – alleged in their complaint Thursday that the firm turned in forms with fake signatures and false information, said Chris Cate, spokesman for the Division of Elections, which will turn over its findings to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Assn. of Supervisors of Elections, said Friday that she had heard from elections officials in Lee, Bay, Clay, Santa Rosa, Escambia and Okaloosa counties who had also identified problematic voter registration forms turned in by the Florida GOP. Pasco County officials discovered possibly fraudulent forms during the Republican primary, Davis said.

Cate, the spokesman for the state elections division, said possibly fraudulent forms have also been reported in Miami-Dade and Duval, two of the state’s most populous counties.

The number of suspicious voter registration applications was unusual, Davis said. “There might be an occasional one, but I don’t think we’ve ever had this number of counties that have had this number of cases all at the same time,” she said.

In Santa Rosa County, elections officials found 100 problematic voter registration applications out of a batch of roughly 400 turned in by the state Republican Party.

“Anyone with any sense would have known there was something wrong,” said elections supervisor Ann W. Bodenstein.

Most were changes in current registrations filed in the names of real voters, but signatures were spelled differently than the applicants’ names. Fake house numbers were given, and date of births did not match the names. The biggest red flag was that most of the forms were missing Social Security numbers.

“It was that flagrant,” she said. “In no way did they look genuine.”

Bodenstein said it appeared that whoever had been filling out the forms had been working off a database of voters that was at least four years old. She said she thought it was the work of “bottom of the totem pole” workers who were trying to reach a certain quota in order to be paid. Bodenstein reported the suspicious forms to the Office of the State Attorney for the First Judicial Circuit of Florida, which sent out investigators Thursday.

Bodenstein stressed that elections officials would strive to protect every vote.

“We will not disenfranchise anybody,” she said.

But if fraudulent forms changing the addresses of actual voters are inadvertently processed, they could create obstacles at the polls. If someone’s address is changed within the same county, they could still cast a ballot once poll workers were able to establish that the voter was in the correct precinct.

“It’s another step the clerk, the poll worker and the voter would have to go through in order to cast a vote,” Davis said.

Things would get more complicated if a voter’s address has been changed to another county. If that were the case, the voter would be forced to cast a provisional ballot, which would be evaluated later in the week by a local canvassing board.

More than 2,000 provisional ballots were cast in Florida in 2008; less than half of those ballots were ultimately counted, according to University of Florida election law professor Daniel Smith.

Strategic Allied is run by an Arizona-based man named Nathan Sproul, who has been dogged by charges in the past that his employees destroyed Democratic registrations. No charges were ever filed.

But his reputation is such that when Sproul was tapped by the RNC to do field work this year, officials requested that he set up a new firm to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations, Sproul told The Times. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.

In an interview Thursday, Sproul blamed the problematic forms in Palm Beach on one individual and said his firm had offered to assist elections officials in identifying the problems in other counties.
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Voting shenanigans are well under way folks.
 
God dammit Flora

k0ZVs.png
 
I'll be glad when this election is over to much drama all around. What I will be happy about is when they drop gas prices around the time of election and that will be my time to celebrate.
 
For the record, this is the same kind of non-fraud fraud that ACORN ran into -- it's not that anybody is trying to fake voter records, it's that the registrars have metrics and get paid more if they turn in more registration forms, and there's no supervision, so some of them just write up fake registrations. But it's illegal for any registration firm to throw out registration forms just because they know they're fake, because it's obviously possible they aren't -- so they have to turn them in to the county office, which throws them out and write it up as a fraudulent registration, which goes on the company's record. The article mentions this directly.

So it doesn't necessarily mean that there was any ACTUAL fraud -- just bad management practices. (It's possible that there was some fraud -- Nathan Sproul has been accused of throwing out Democratic registration forms before -- but this doesn't prove it.) On the other hand, since stuff like this is part of how ACORN got shut down, I'm perfectly happy for the Republicans to find it necessary to fire and possibly sue this guy.
 
tenchir said:
No wonder the republican party was so sure that there was rampant voting frauds, they were the one doing it.
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While the irony shouldn't be lost on anyone, a clear distinction should be drawn between:
Voter registration fraud, which can occur at any time due to improperly filled-out or outright fabricated voter registration forms being turned in
and
In-person voter fraud, which only occurs during the scope of an election and is the type of "problem" that Voter ID laws were introduced to "fix."

Appropriately enough, the former is a much larger and more impactful issue than the latter, but the Voter ID laws geared toward "stamping out fraud" have no impact whatsoever on counteracting voter registration fraud.
 
Where are the republicans possibly committing voting fraud here?

I've read the entire article twice and it looks to me like it was the get-out-the-vote firm that they hired who committed possible fraud, and once the RNC found out about it, they fired the firm and self-reported it to election officials.
 
Zhengi said:
More reason to have voter ID laws enacted.
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Not related.

Voter ID laws are point-of-transaction and there has been a precedent of individuals voting for decades using forms of ID (i.e. photo student ID, Social Security card, etc.) which are now being deemed ineligible.

In contrast, voter registration fraud, depending on the form that it takes, can inflate voter rolls, but is mostly harmless except in the case where opposition party registrations are deliberately destroyed or not accepted, which seems to have happened in this case.

The only irony here is the manufactured outrage around ACORN that brought it down and here we have a company directly paid by the RNC engaging in registration fraud, registration quotas, possible destruction of opposition registrations, and so on. And on top of it, it's from an individual and a company that had been previously accused of the same actions and got away with it under Bush's DoJ. Show me the outrage from Fox News and the Right and we'll call it even.
 
bill0527 said:
Where are the republicans possibly committing voting fraud here?

I've read the entire article twice and it looks to me like it was the get-out-the-vote firm that they hired who committed possible fraud, and once the RNC found out about it, they fired the firm and self-reported it to election officials.
Click to expand...

The parties always outsource their voter fraud. Plausible deniability.
 
pigeon said:
For the record, this is the same kind of non-fraud fraud that ACORN ran into -- it's not that anybody is trying to fake voter records, it's that the registrars have metrics and get paid more if they turn in more registration forms, and there's no supervision, so some of them just write up fake registrations. But it's illegal for any registration firm to throw out registration forms just because they know they're fake, because it's obviously possible they aren't -- so they have to turn them in to the county office, which throws them out and write it up as a fraudulent registration, which goes on the company's record. The article mentions this directly.

So it doesn't necessarily mean that there was any ACTUAL fraud -- just bad management practices. (It's possible that there was some fraud -- Nathan Sproul has been accused of throwing out Democratic registration forms before -- but this doesn't prove it.) On the other hand, since stuff like this is part of how ACORN got shut down, I'm perfectly happy for the Republicans to find it necessary to fire and possibly sue this guy.
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Thanks for the explanation. It answers a few of the questions that I had.
 
And people wonder why I get risible when the topic of 'voter fraud' is brought up. The ones defending it are the same people attempting to disenfranchise as many marginalized citizens from casting their vote. This goes beyond just simply being a partisan issue.
 
bill0527 said:
That might make sense, if the party didn't self-report the possible shenanigans and got caught red-handed by an outside source.
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I don't know what you mean by "self-report." The consulting firm turned in the voter rolls, the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections flagged 106 of them as questionable, and in response the Republican National Committee is severing ties to the agency. This is known as "damage control"; while it neither indicates nor dispels guilt to any degree, it's also not synonymous with being noble.

This aspect of the story:
Republican National Committee, which admitted Thursday that it urged state parties in seven swing states to hire the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting
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is somewhat damning. The agency in question is not without a storied past before this event. It was founded by Nathan Sproul:
Sproul, a consultant based in Tempe, is infamous for accusations that his firms have committed fraud by tampering with Democratic voter registration forms and suppressing votes. Sproul was hired by the Romney campaign for a period of five months that began last November and ended in March. But now there’s evidence that the payments continued, only to a different name.
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bill0527 said:
That might make sense, if the party didn't self-report the possible shenanigans and got caught red-handed by an outside source.
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What gives you the impression that the RNC "self-reported"?

http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/...s-with-firm-over-voter-fraud-allegations?lite

In addition to Palm Beach County, where election officials initially reported 106 instances of suspected fraudulent registration forms, officials in Okaloosa, Pasco, Santa Rosa, Lee and Clay counties have also reported instances of possible fraudulent forms submitted by the firm, officials said.​

Also,

Sproul has been previously accused of suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms, and manipulating ballot initiatives. His firms -- formerly Sproul & Associates, Lincoln Strategy, and Strategic Allied Consultants -- had previously worked for RNC voter registration efforts during the campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain. In 2004, Democratic Senators Leahy and Kennedy sent a letter to then Attorney General John Ashcroft requesting that he "launch an immediate investigation into the activities of Mr. Sproul and his firm." But the request did not lead to any criminal charges against Sproul.​

Guy has a history of these actions.
 
bill0527 said:
That might make sense, if the party didn't self-report the possible shenanigans and got caught red-handed by an outside source.
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They didn't. The original fraud was uncovered by the election officials. Then the party went "oh sure yeah, please check everything, this is bad!"
 
Raist said:
They didn't. The original fraud was uncovered by the election officials. Then the party went "oh sure yeah, please check everything, this is bad!"
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Conservative Reality Distortion Field™ activated

LALALALALALALALALA DIDN'T READ LALALALALALAA CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALALALA ACORN BLACK PANTHERS LALALLAALAL LIBERAL MEDIA
 
tenchir said:
No wonder the republican party was so sure that there was rampant voting frauds, they were the one doing it.
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Pretty much. Anyway, disgraceful and actually quite unexpected, with respect to the 1 in 4 county fraud count. Republicans are getting desperate and ever more unscrupulous.
 
Raist said:
They didn't. The original fraud was uncovered by the election officials. Then the party went "oh sure yeah, please check everything, this is bad!"
Click to expand...

I assumed that election officials were a bi-partisan committee which would be made up of both Republicans and Democrats. I was wrong about it being the actual party reporting it. So I guess every one of these scumbag republicans in Florida should be summarily executed by sundown, or at least by November 6th. My mistake. Carry on.
 
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