"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. "
and
“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 dates of birth did not match the names. The biggest red flag was that most of the forms were missing Social Security numbers.”
It appears the GOP registration scandal is spreading to other states.
I suppose the point of all this is to have voters appear at the polls and only be allowed to register a provisional ballot since the voter’s ID won’t match the registration form.
And, it appears the RNC is behind it as they have paid for Strategic Allied Consulting, a company with a history of fraud, to hire the registrars in various states. At first, the early news reports to blamed a rogue registrar in Florida, but now it seems to be a concerted, multi-state, effort.
Did the firm identify the fake registrations to the appropriate authorities in a timely manner, as they were supposed to do? Or did they just ignore the fake registrations, and hope nobody would notice.
I believe ACORN did the right, legal thing, (identified the fake registrations to the authorities) and were still pilloried for it.
But their job was to register voters. Submitting the names of existing registered voters with address changes seems to fail that goal. On the other hand, it probably does meet the “goal” of making sure some votes don’t get counted. It’ll be interesting to see the analysis of the party breakdown of those voters who would have had to cast provisional ballots if the GOP’s hand-picked America-hating party-above-country fuck-the-Constitution shit-on-the-Founding-Fathers money-is-God Jesus-was-a-fucking-liberal registrars had been successful.
It fails the goal of the GOP. It doesn’t fail the goal of the people who are paid if they can register “X number of GOP leaning voters”. If they can’t find enough real voters, they just go through the roles and submit phony address change registrations from a list of old registered voters, and get paid as if they’d actually done their job.
I agree. But the fact that ACORN had to do so suggests its not an uncommon problem for the people who get hired to register voters to submit fake registrations to meet quotas. ACORN quite rightly had a quality control check to catch the fakes, SAC (the firm hired by the GOP) apparently didn’t. But in that case, its the GOP that’s the victim of a crappy firm, since they’re a) paying money for fake registrations and b) having the registrations of presumably GOP leaning voters screwed up.
Except that this firm has been accused of this EXACT thing in the past and apparently only got off because back then the DOJ was under Republican control. That makes it the GOP’s problem.
Cite? I can find a reference to the person in charge having run a previous outfit that was accused (but never charged with) shredding Dem registration forms, but none of them running a scheme like the one your accusing them of this year.
“Apparently” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Anyhoo, should be easy to prove which theory is correct. If the fake registrations were ordered by the higher-ups, they should all be from Dem leaning demographics. If they were just done by lazy workers filling out forms instead of going door-to-door, they should be from GOP leaning demographics.
You know what? Conceded. It does appear that previously, the company simply either only registered Republicans or shredded Democratic forms. Much better! Why, they are almost virginal in their innocence. That totally gets the GOP off the hook! It’s like hiring an accused serial killer and then claiming no fault when the guy is found to have molested children on the job.
Hence my comment that I can’t wait to see the breakdown. I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t the “October surprise” only for the ‘wrong’ side.
Actually, there’s little evidence that the DOJ did any investigating. Instead, Bush invited Sproul to the White House for Christmas dinner in 2006. BTW, later information is turning up the same “register only Republicans” behavior in the Panhandle (which, for the geographically challenged, makes it damn hard to believe that this was the work of “one employee” in South Florida).
Of course it’s a common enough problem. When folks are paid “per piece”, and are not micro-supervised, things like this will happen. That is why there are normally safeguards in place.
Trouble is, ACORN was badmouthed for following proper rules. Trouble is, GOP politicians used this excuse to pretty much eliminate ACORN as an organization.
Now, let’s listen to those same politicians today: <crickets>
Of course, when ACORN collected iffy registrations, they turned them over to the elections offices anyway – as required by law – and flagged them as suspicious – as required by law. Strategic Allied Consulting appears to have overlooked the second step.
This is just stupid. I’m not talking immoral or criminal, because that train’s left the station, but stupid.
Unless the RNC is planning on doing some third world level of election fraud, they’re not going to be able to steal this election. This isn’t 2000 or 2004, where a few thousand votes might decide it. They’d need to steal millions of votes in several different states to have a shot at winning this November.
The smartest thing the RNC could be doing right now is be scrupulously honest in this election. Make sure they follow every rule and then go an extra mile. They want to allay any thought about voter fraud form the public mind.
And then, starting in January, they can begin work on stealing the 2016 election - in a purely speculative and hypothetical sense.
But instead they’re violating one of the first rules of crime: they’re putting people on guard with an unsuccessful attempt. That’s just going to make people suspicious and they’ll all be watching extra carefully next time.
Which is another reason I doubt its intentional. To influence the election this way, the GOP would need tens of thousands of provisional ballots to be discarded. In FL last election, there were 2000 provisional ballots total. I can’t really see a scheme where that total grows by a factor of thirty or fourty without it being obvious what happened.
SAC being careless remains a much more likely scenario.
That’s not a very ringing endorsement: “Nobody made a conscious decision to commit fraud in this election. We just did things the way we always do them and a whole bunch of fraud just sort of happened.”
Meh. While this is kind of funny in an egg-on-the-face way, it’s the most trivial sort of electoral fraud imaginable. Fake registrations have zero influence on the actual election. Nobody shows up to cast a fake vote when some lazy schmuck creates a fake registration in order to meet a quota.
I hope folks can get a chuckle out of this petard-hoisting, and then move on to real election issues such as voter suppression.
Its the screwing around with legitimate democratic registrations that is the problem. This could disenfranchise people and I could see it affecting outcomes if done in the right places.
