Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
It seems that trouble is brewing again in the State of Florida since election officials have discovered suspicious voter registration forms in at least 10 Florida counties. “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.” LA Times
If you guessed that these possibly fraudulent registration forms were just a minor error or blip on the registration screen, you might be wrong. When you have these documents turning up in 10 counties, including the two largest counties, Miami-Dade and Duval counties, people should sit up and notice.
“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.” LA Times
The company at the heart of this potential scandal was recommended to the state Republican organizations by the Republican National Committee. “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.” LA Times
Does it concern anyone else that all the states involved so far could be considered swing states in the upcoming Presidential election? If this company was working in several other states, could this improper activity show up in the other states listed? These improper registration forms could cause havoc at the polling booth and force many legal voters to vote by provisional ballot, that in many cases never get counted. This is not the first time the owner behind this company has been in trouble. The history behind Nathan Sproul, is interesting to say the least.
“The firm’s founder, Nathan Sproul, is a longtime Republican strategist whose reputation was tarred by widespread accusations of voter registration fraud and attempts to suppress Democratic voter turnout. George W. Bush’s campaign reportedly paid Sproul over $8 million for his work in the 2004 election. Sproul, now under new scrutiny, claims he started Strategic Allied Consulting because the RNC wanted to hide his past:
Sproul said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the RNC’s request because the party wanted to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.
“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.” Think Progress
Why would the RNC push this company on the state organizations, knowing the shaky history of Mr. Sproul? If I remember correctly, the Republican Party crucified ACORN when they admitted that certain employees had turned in improper registration forms and turned in those employees to the authorities. Is the Liberal Media going to follow the same path and relentlessly attack Mr. Sproul and his organization and the RNC for these alleged voter registration transgressions?
Since the RNC suggested that Sproul start-up a whole new company to do this work, is this an example of a planned dirty trick by the Republican Party or is it just an example of a guy with a checkered past not doing a good job at supervising his workers? “The suspected fraud included apparent cases of dead people being registered as Republican voters, said Paul Lux, the supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County and a Republican. He compared the suspected fraud to the alleged acts of ACORN, the liberal activist group that became the center of a national controversy several years ago. “It’s kind of ironic that the dead people they accused Acorn of registering are now being done by the RPOF” [Republican Party of Florida], Lux said in an interview with NBC News.” NBC News
Ironic was not the word I would have used. What do you think happened here? Is this another ACORN situation that can be blamed on “bad apples”? When you combine the Voter ID laws and this kind of activity, it could be argued that this is just part of an illegal strategy to disenfranchise voters. Let’s hear your opinion!
Ralph, so how big a check did your guys give Hugo to do this? Wouldn’t it be IRONIC?
The Republicans had to do it. They had to fraudulent register people to vote so that they can say fraudulent registration has occurred and needs to be dealt with. They are truly beyond redemption on this issue and the media will no doubt let them skate away. IRONIC indeed!
“I can’t wait for Republicans to use their own registration scandal as an argument to strengthen voter ID laws.”
Actually Nal’s thought was similar to what came to mind when I read Larry’s piece. Considering that down here in FLA little Ricky Scott has been working at voter suppression laws, with Democrats arguing there is no voter fraud, viola!, we have voter fraud. Time to get those registration laws updated in the face of this threat. 🙂
GOP Fires Controversial Voter Suppression Operative, but Is He Still Playing Dirty Tricks In California?
Lee Fang on September 28, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/blog/170246/gop-fires-controversial-voter-suppression-operative-he-still-playing-dirty-tricks-califo#
Excerpt:
It appears that the Republican Party of California might have its own deal with Sproul, and is also attempting to hide it from the public.
As I noted in an update to my post on Wednesday, the California Republican Party has made $430,840 in payments to “Grassroots Outreach, LLC” this cycle for voter registration.
Is this another Sproul shell group? And are they up to the same tactics as before? Lance Williams at California Watch reports that a recent complaint in Riverside County details a number of allegations that someone affiliated with the GOP is deceiving voters to re-register them as Republicans and offering free cigarettes for signatures. They’re reportedly targeting minorities:
One voter complained that his registration was changed to Republican after he signed what he thought was a petition to legalize marijuana. Another said he was told he was signing a petition to lower the price of gasoline, according to the affidavits.
Others said they were offered free cigarettes or a “job at the polls” if they signed some paperwork. Also among the Democrats who said they were involuntarily re-registered as Republicans: two aides to retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Roth, a Democrat locked in a tight race with Republican Assemblyman Jeff Miller for a state Senate seat.
Many of the complainants were Latino or African American.
I can’t wait for Republicans to use their own registration scandal as an argument to strengthen voter ID laws.
Elaine,
Great links. Thanks.
bettykath,
That is disturbing to see that the third prong attack on the vote has been identified. I am shocked to see that Romney’s friends might be principals in electronic voting machines!
Ralph,
If these allegations about voter registration fraud and that the voter id laws are all aimed at stopping legal voters from voting, then the RNC may have paid money to Hugo for his endorsement?? 🙂
Fraudulent HOW? How can you make fraudulent registration forms? I don’t see how that’s possible! And Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties? Sheeesh! Hardly anyone lives there! Of course, I know there has beens fraud going on with LBJ having all those dead people voting for him (never figured out how they did that). But I do not see how you could have fraudulent voter IDs here. When I got mine there was no way you could get it fraudulently.
False registrations, organized voter challenges, required photo id cards it’ll be a wonder if any of us actually get to vote. But if we do, don’t be surprised if our votes aren’t counted as we intended. The computers never went away.
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/13716-focus-vote-counting-company-tied-to-romney
everal Tanker trucks full of political ink have been spilled on Mitt Romney’s tenure as a vulture capitalist at Bain Capital. A more important story, however, is the fact that Bain alumni, now raising big money as Romney bundlers are also in the electronic voting machine business. This appears to be a repeat of the the infamous former CEO of Diebold Wally O’Dell, who raised money for Bush while his company supplied voting machines and election management software in the 2004 election.
In all 234 counties of Texas, the entire states of Hawaii and Oklahoma, half of Washington and Colorado, and certain counties in swing state Ohio, votes will be cast on eSlate and ePollbook machines made by Hart Intercivic. Hart Intercivic machines have famously failed in Tarrant County (Ft. Worth), adding 10,000 non-existant votes. The EVEREST study, commissioned by the Ohio secretary of state in 2007, found serious security flaws with Hart Intercivic products.
Looking beyond the well-documented Google choking laundry list of apparent fraud, failure and seeming corruption that is associated with Hart Intercivic, an ongoing Free Press investigation turned its attention to the key question of who owns the voting machine companies. The majority of the directors of Hart come from the private equity firm H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. has been heavily invested in Hart Intercivic since July 2011, just in time for the current presidential election cycle. But who is H.I.G Capital?
Out of 49 partners and directors, 48 are men, and 47 are white. Eleven of these men, including H.I.G. Founder Tony Tamer, were formerly employed at Bain and Company, and two of those men, John P. Bolduc, Douglas Berman, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.
Additionally, four of these men were formerly employed at Booz Allen Hamilton. Booz Allen, now owned by the Bush family friendly Carlyle group, also made voting machines for the United States military. Booz Allen was also the key subcontractor for the controversial PioneerGroundbreaker program, an NSA data mining operation that gathered information on American citizens until it was shut down and replaced with even more invasive successor programs like MATRIX and Total Information Awareness.
H.I.G. Capital employees have given $338,000 to Mitt Romney’s campaign. That amounts to over $1500 per employee. Bain Capital, Mitt’s former company, by comparison, only gave him $268,000. H.I.G. is the 11th largest donor to the Romney Campaign. Clearly they are working really hard for their man. It appears that they will work even harder on election night. Although not boisterously promising to deliver states where their machines are to Romney as Wally O’Dell of Diebold did for Bush in 2004, they can launder hundreds of thousands of votes and swing the vote in the crucial swing state Ohio.
Will Mitt’s cronies steal our democracy the way they stole our jobs? Time will tell, but they have certainly positioned themselves to do so if they choose.
In our first investigative article Who owns Scytl? George Soros isn’t in the voting machines, but the intelligence community is.
the Free Press revealed that Scytl, a Spanish-based company now contracted to count 25% of the U.S. presidential vote, has ties to Booz Allen. Scytl’s start up funding comes from three European Venture Capital Firms, Balderton Capital, Nauta Capital, and Spinnaker SCR. The director of Nauta’s American operations is Dominic Endicott, who went from Cluster Consulting to Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH) where he oversaw wireless practice. He then rejoined his former colleagues from Cluster Consulting at Nauta. In his capacity as a Nauta partner Endicott also sits on the board of CarrierIQ.
Scytl has emerged as the most mysterious election counting company in this presidential election. Scytl claims to have a Scytl USA division located in Glen Allen, Virginia. The following is a photo of the Scytl USA national corporate offices at 6012 Glen Allen Drive. The land deed records show that the ownership of the property at that address is Hugh Gallagher, now listed as the managing director of Scytl USA. The deed, which was prepared in Ohio by a relocation firm in 2002, pre-dates the creation of Scytl USA. A Scytl USA sales office is located in Baltimore, Maryland, and appears to be a Rent-an-Office, often referred to as a “virtual” office with a shared secretary that serves as a mail drop.
The ties of Hart Intercivic to Romney fund-raisers and Bain alumni should cause concern in the Obama re-election campaign. So, should the mysterious Spanish owned company, Scytl, with a U.S operation that seems to be an illusion.
GOP voter form scandal spreads
Suspicious registration forms have now been found in 10 Florida counties
BY NATASHA LENNARD
9/30/2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/30/gop_voter_form_scandal_spreads/
Excerpt:
Strategic Alliance is owned by Nathan Sproul, a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. Sproul’s 2004 voter registration project was investigated by the Justice Department and the attorneys general in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon as claims of fraud emerged, but no charges were brought. As Brad Friedman noted on his Brad Blog last week, despite Sproul’s checkered past, Mitt Romney’s campaign hired him as a political consultant late last year.
Friedman also noted that the voter form scandal, along with the recent revelation of a video showing a GOP voter registration worker screening out Democrats, is far worse than the claims made against ACORN over fraudulent voter registration in the past. Even before the latest news of suspicious voter forms, Friedman noted:
While Republicans had long been critical of fraudulent voter registration efforts they inaccurately attributed to ACORN, the non-partisan, four-decade old community organizing group (which has since been forced into bankruptcy as a result of the years-long GOP effort to mischaracterize them and their work) there is no evidence, to our knowledge, that any of its tens of thousands of registration workers ever screened out potential registrants from one party or another before allowing them to register, as seen in CO.
Neither is there evidence that any of their workers ever changed party affiliations on registration forms, as is being alleged tonight in Palm Beach County, or destroyed Democratic forms, as has been alleged over the years, as noted by Republican Rep. Cannon. [Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), during a hearing on voter fraud, said that “the difference between ACORN and Sproul is that ACORN doesn’t throw away or change registration documents after they have been filled out.”]
About Mr. Sproul
JOSH MARSHALL
SEPTEMBER 30, 2012
TPM Editor’s Blog
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/09/about_mr_sproul.php
Excerpt:
All that said, Mr. Sproul isn’t just any bad actor. As longtime TPM Readers know, back in 2004 he was credibly accused of doing something far more nefarious: impersonating Democratic-leaning groups, registering as many Democrats as possible and then destroying those legitimate registrations rather than turning them into local canvassing boards. This wouldn’t create fraudulent ballots but it would convince a lot of legitimate voters that they were registered only to show up at the ballot box and realize they weren’t — thus effectively blocking their Democratic votes.
Having watched this game for a longtime I have little doubt Sproul is a bad actor — his name has repeatedly come up with either the sloppiest methods or gambits which seem intended not simply to pump up fees but to stop Democrats from voting, as in 2004. And there’s at least some suggestion now that the RNC asked Sproul to create new legal entities so it wouldn’t be cleared it was him — with his besmirched reputation — they were hiring.
Ralph,
You will be unhappy to know that some of the “Leftists” here do not support Obama. There are no “Leftists” here. Only small “l” leftists, a few small “r” rightists and the usual contingent of far Rightists trolls such as yourself. Besides, if you think anyone was waiting around waffling on who they were going to vote for until they heard who Hugo endorsed, you are simply experiencing some kind of mild hallucination where people outside of Venezuela give a damn what Hugo thinks about our elections.
Blouise,
You know Hugo–the fella you went to the Annual Communists Cotillion with last spring.
😉
rafflaw,
Glad you did a post about this. I had done some research on the story–but didn’t have time to write about it.
Dirty voter tricks: Nathan Sproul and the GOP (Lee Fang talks to Jennifer Granholm)
Ralph Adamo,
Hugo who?
Turley and all the other Leftists on this blog will be delighted to learn to Hugo Chavez has just endorsed Obama. That’s right, your hero, Chavez, has actually come out to support YOUR guy. Chavez is a big supporter of Ahmadinijad, who is also one of your heros (although I realize that you’re not ready to come out of the closet one that one just yet). So it looks like a happy trio of Obama-Chavez-Ahmadinjad is shaping up very nicely. Celebrate and savor.
I have the words with Friends app on my Ipad. You are right that there is no math involved! 🙂
raff,
It’s Sunday … I’m resting
Get the Scrabble app … no math involved
Bush election fraud again ! What’s wrong with Florida, hope they get to the bottom of this.
Blouise,
you are being polite!
Do as I say; not as I do.