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Subscribe to RSSThe Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd talks to NBC's Michael Isikoff about Florida voting fraud and what's being done about it now
Updated: 8:46p.m. ET: Election officials in six Florida counties are investigating what appears to be "hundreds” of cases of suspected voter fraud by a GOP consulting firm that has been paid nearly $3 million by the Republican National Committee to register Republican voters in five key battleground states, state officials tell NBC.
But the veteran GOP consultant, Nathan Sproul, who runs the firm, strongly defended his company's conduct, saying it has rigorous "quality controls" and blamed the alleged fraud on the actions of a few "bad apples," workers who were hired to register Republican voters for $12 an hour and then tried to "cheat the system."
The allegations of suspected voter fraud committed by Strategic Allied Consulting of Tempe, Arizona spread Thursday to counties throughout Florida. At the same time, the Republican National Committee said it had severed its ties to the firm altogether.
"We have heard from supervisors in six counties that they have irregularities in voter registration," said Chris Cate, spokesman for the Florida Department of State, which oversees the state's division of elections. Although local prosecutors are already investigating the firm's conduct, Cate said state officials were also considering turning the matter over to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to determine if there was a pattern of misconduct.
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.
While Republican groups as a whole are still outspending Democratic groups, the gap is narrowing, in part to the individual donors finally stepping up on the Democrats' behalf. NBC News' Michael Isikoff discusses.
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.
In a statement on Strategic Allied's website, the firm's lawyer said:
"Strategic has a zero tolerance policy for breaking the law. Accordingly, once we learned of the irregularities in Palm Beach County, we were able to trace all questionable cards to one individual and immediately terminated our working relationship with the individual in question. Strategic is committed to following the letter of the law and will continue to cooperate with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections to ensure that this issue is resolved."
Sproul said in a telephone interview that his company has employed between 4,000 and 5,000 people to register Republican voters under its contract with the RNC, including over 2,000 in Florida. The employees are given training on how to register voters, including being required to watch a video instructing them not to register felons. The video also instructs recruiters not to "modify or falsify voter registration forms."
"No matter what quality controls you have there are always going to be bad actors in any large scale operation," Sproul said.
Sproul, who has long worked for the GOP, also criticized Florida and national Republican officials for dumping him.
"They're trying to get the distraction behind them," he said about the RNC's action.
Sean Spicer, communications director for the RNC, said Strategic Allied Consulting had been retained by the RNC and state Republican parties to register new Republican voters in five key battleground states.
But Spicer said that the party's relationship with the firm-- which has been paid $2.9 million by the RNC so far this year, according to federal elections records -- has now been terminated in light of alleged voter fraud linked to one of the firm's employees that was reported this week to Florida prosecutors by election officials in Palm Beach County.
"We've made it clear we're not doing business with these guys anymore," said Spicer. "We've come out pretty strong against this kind of stuff -- and we have zero tolerance for this."
Strategic Allied’s parent firm, Lincoln Strategy Group, also headed by Sproul, has been paid about $80,000 by the Romney campaign to conduct "field consulting," according to election records. Asked for comment, Sarah Pompei, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, said by email: "We used this vendor for signature gathering services during the primary but have not used them since 2011."
Besides Florida, Strategic Allied Consulting was hired to register GOP voters in Nevada, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia. Spicer said it was the only firm hired by the RNC to conduct voter registration. In the case of Nevada, he said, the RNC was paying the firm directly. In the other four states, the firm was being paid by state parties with the funds reimbursed by the RNC.
The allegations involving voter fraud by the GOP consulting firm are a new twist in the national controversy over the threat posed by voter fraud and the impact of new state laws passed by Republican controlled legislatures to combat it. While Republican officials have repeatedly accused Democratic groups such as ACORN of fraudulently registering voters in the past, the new dispute over what happened in Palm Beach-- involving the registration of Republican voters -- appears to be one of the first to have led to a criminal inquiry in this year's election.
Christine Weiss, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach State Attorney's Office, told NBC News Thursday that the alleged voter fraud by a Strategic Allied Consulting employee is "currently being investigated" by prosecutors in her office after it was brought to the attention of prosecutors on Monday by Palm Beach election supervisor Susan Bucher.
Out of 304 Republican voter registration forms recently dropped off by a Strategic Allied employee at a small "satellite office" of the Palm Beach elections office, 106 were flagged as potentially fraudulent-- including "a lot" with "similar looking" signatures and others with apparently phony addresses, Susan Bucher, the Palm Beach elections supervisor, said in an interview.
Among the suspect home addresses were those that matched a gas station in Miami, a medical building in Boca Raton and a Land Rover automotive dealership in Palm Beach County, she told NBC News.
Bucher said she called in the political director for the Palm Beach Republican Party and the GOP official agreed that the registration forms were a problem. She then took the forms to the Palm Beach County State's Attorney's office on Monday and requested the investigation.
In a statement issued Tuesday night, Mike Grissom, executive director of the Florida Republican Party, said: "When we learned today about the instances of potential voter registration fraud that occurred in Palm Beach County, we immediately informed the Republican National Committee that we were terminating the contract with the voter registration vendor we hired at their request because there is no place for voter registration fraud in Florida."
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.
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The GOP has found the enemy, and it is them.
With the current polls, Republicans have become delusional about the outcome.
Humm so the GOP is behind all the so called voter registration fraud......I know they fired them but it wasn't the GOP that brought it to light.....It was a voter registration supervisor that found it....Guess the GOP was forced to fire them or look even more foolish than they already do!
Republicans for Obama
Because the GOP can't seem to put anyone up there worthy of voting for.
Gee... didn't hear any indignation from Hannity or Limbaugh on this one.
Ahh the GOP and Republicans will just say it was their Democratic employee's LOL
Republicans for Obama
Because the GOP can't seem to put anyone up there worthy of voting for
hey,are you kidding? sean or rush rely on "dick"morris to tell them that romney is in the lead according to his polls.
besides,where is the phoney pimp and hooker? surely they are knowing of this one.
besides,is it not in florida that they elected a gov.who's company was cheating the federal government.only in florida.
This has been going on for awhile ..
This story was published on July 5, 2005.
RNC VOTE FRAUD?
Team Bush Paid Millions to Nathan Sproul—and Tried to Hide It
by Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas
In the months before the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group--run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party--had been hired by the Republican National Committee.
Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.
The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states--and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in "conspiracy theory."
It seems that Sproul did quite a lot of work for the Republicans. Exactly how much did he do? More specifically, how much did the RNC pay Sproul & Associates?
If you went online last week to look up how much money Sproul received from the Republicans in 2004, you would have found that, according to the party (whose figures had been posted by the Center for Responsive Politics), the firm was paid $488,957.
In fact, the RNC paid Sproul a great deal more than that. From an independent study of the original data filed by the Republicans with the Federal Election Commission, it is clear that Sproul was paid a staggering $8.3 million for its work against the Democrats.
How the true figures came to be revealed
http://baltimorechronicle.com/070505Miller-Irmus.shtml
I am so glad to be back in the land of sanity and around people who think for themselves. I got caught up in the wilderness somehow and those conservatives had a real mad on. I am mostly black and blue but I stood them off you would have been proud of me.
And this surprises anyone how??? Just think real hard about who is making the touch-screen voting machines. Voter id laws to screen out nonexistant voter fraud all of a sudden seem like they have a real purpose here--lets verify everyone after they enter a republican ballot and before their votes get counted. Huu-Rah
Spin Republicans. Twist and Shout! Come on! Come on now twist and shout!
When someone starts telling you how moral they are or how immoral the other guy is, cover your wallet and your sphincter. The GOP is a bunch of desperate old white elite racists and misogynists who would rather be with the alter boys than their wives. Bet they had ties to Rove.
Well, finally, the GOP found that voter fraud they're always saying exists. And it turns out, they're the ones they've been looking for. Way to go, GOP....way to go.
Why hasn't this been more widely reported on ...I hear ACORN in my sleep
GOP voter drive raises questions about company, laws
, May 4, 2012
SACRAMENTO, CA - Sacramento County elections officials have turned over what they say are several suspicious voter registration cards that were collected by a for-profit company hired by local and state Republicans to state election fraud investigators.
How big of a problem are the voter registration cards that were part of the GOP voter drive?
"Enough that we started keeping track," Sacramento County registrar of voters Jill LaVine said.
Once they started keeping track, LaVine said staffers found invalid voter registration cards at much higher rates than previous for-profit registration drives. She said that during the month of April, 44 percent of all invalid voter registration cards in the county came from just one company.
The company is Sacramento-based Momentum Political Services, a small operation that hires independent contractors to fan out across the region and register voters. In many cases, those contractors also circulate petitions for ballot initiatives, and often register citizens at the same time they enlist a signature in support of one or more initiatives.
http://www.news10.net/news/article/192033/2/Sacramento-elections-officials-GOP-voter-drive-suspicious
most of these voter fraud allegations are really voter registration fraud- see post 117 for an explanation.
mickey mouse and donald duck have registered to vote in all fifty states but so far no actual sightings on election day.
But when its a democratic organization like Acorn its National news
Truth Hurts the GOP everytime - we know had it not been for Bush stealing the election we would not have this stuff going on. Maybe the new GOP think they can do it better. Maybe we need our troops to monitor the poll booths this November since this one will definitely turn the country.
WTFHAPPENED
By hook and crook, the Republican stole the elections of 2000/2004 - So what else is new here!!? American citizens are becoming more aware of the tricky & sophisticated methods of tainting the voting outcome numbers!!
Perhaps the RNC feared exposure, so they moved to sever ties? I don't think this move was made because of any moral high-ground on their part!!
Let me understand this: the RNC pays millions of dollars to a consulting firm to find voting cheaters - and THEY ARE the voting cheaters (I wonder if that was the plan all along!) There is a GOD!
Come on James in FLA-2431635, tell us how you really feel.
I was a paid voter registration worker in California. Most of my co-workers were drug addicts who had no problem changing a person's registration from democrat to republican[they were paying $3.00 per name, democrats paid 50 cents]. We turned our petions and voter registrations over to a broker once a week and were paid the next week for our efforts. My wife and I averaged $500 to $1,000 a week without cheating. The drug addicts were making 4 or 5 times that much. They did not care about getting caught, they just wanted to get another fix.
The Democrats use volunteers to register voters. The Republicans prefer to contribute money, then sit on their asses and hire others to do the work. You get what you pay for...
Any Republicans care to answer up? Thanks John. They usually hate truth. Especially when it's straight from a witness.
GOP, fighting voter fraud, commits voter fraud...
Romney got distracted during the campaign. Visiting all these companies made him drool for money. The thoughts race through his mind, "The money I could make dismantling these companies and sending the jobs to China, India and Mexico!".
With a Fraudster as Governor (remember he committed the largest medicare fraud in history and should be in Jail) on its top, this state is sick to the root with voter fraud by the GOP. They go to any length to disenfranchise legitimate voted. Time to investigate the GOP for Fraud.
Darn...almost makes me want to get a few extra registrations myself to cancel the bogus repub ones. Florida seems like a good place to start registering but there are few other states where I could do some good.
Was this ever on fox...
Friday, October 27, 2006
12 charged in voter scandal
The Orange County Register
Felony charges were filed this week against 12 signature gatherers accused of registering Orange County voters as Republicans without their consent – part of a criminal probe into voter flipping.
An Orange County Register investigation in April found that more than 100 people who thought they were signing petitions to cure breast cancer and punish child molesters were duped into registering as Republicans. The signature gatherers were part of an Orange County Republican registration drive that paid up to $10 for each "convert," especially in the heatedstate 34th SenateDistrict.
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1336860.php
Republicans will do anything to win. Cheating is just another tactic. They see the harm and hide behind it's consequence by blaming Democrats.
Seems strange. Doesn't Orange County (The O.C.) have enough Republicans?
No surprise here, but it is good to see Karma taking place. It is truly very sad that the GOP has stooped to this level...remember the hanging chads?!
the real voter fraud is represented by the sec of state in ohio. When each county voted to expand voting hours the republicans in R counties liked the idea. The dems who always favor expnded voting agreed. But in democratic counties the republican members voted against the expanded hours and the republicon sec of state(who had the deciding vote if a 2-2 tie) voted against the expanded hours.
in 2004 the R sec of state withheld voting booths from democratic precints causing as much as 8 hour waits. Wonder how Bush carried Ohio in 04 when exit polling had him losing.
The republicans have always placed party ahead of country
How can Sproul get away with this? Is this not FRAUDULENT and subject to Federal law?
He and all his GOP buddies should be in Jail!!!!
They won't do it again. Until the next time.