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Thousands of Fake Republicans Are Being Registered by Romney and the GOP
An expert in voter registration fraud is a person by the name of Nathan Sproul. In 2004, The RNC hired Sproul’s company, Sproul and Associates to register Republican voters for the Bush/Cheney campaign. Sproul and Associates was paid 8 million dollars for its services to the Bush Campaign – a fact the Bush Campaign attempted to obscure, according The Baltimore Chronicle in 2005.
Sproul’s voter registration businesses had a habit of intentionally misplacing forms they collected from people who intended to register with the Democratic Party. They also engaged in the curious tactic of harassing voters to register as Republicans.
In 2004, Salon reported on Sproul and Associates, revealing a web of deception inherent in the company’s practices on anything from recruiting canvassers to their voter registration tactics.
Sproul and Associates used Kelly Services to hire canvassers. Prospective employees were led to believe they would be working in customer service.
The people at Kelly were cagey about the nature of the position. They first made the applicants watch workplace-safety videos before divulging that the job had nothing at all to do with customer service. Instead, employees would be conducting a “political survey.” A few people left after hearing that news.
It wasn’t until the following day that recruits learned they would be working for the Republican Party.
Lisa Bragg told Salon:
Those who remained were asked to attend “orientation” at the Charleston Civic Center the next day. There, the workers were let in on the big secret: “They said we’d be working for the Republicans,”
According to the same report by Salon, former employees told them and others, they were encouraged to lie and cheat. They were told to destroy registration forms of Democrats who had registered to vote with Sproul canvassers. Moreover, at least one employee claimed they were only paid for the Republican Registration forms they turned in.
Michael Johnson, a Sproul canvasser in Portland, Ore., told a local TV station there last week that because he wasn’t being paid for the Democratic forms he turned in, he “might” sometimes trash them.
Alternet also reported on Sproul’s Services for the Bush campaign in 2004,via Voter Outreach of America.
Voter Outreach of America provided the service of registering Republicans and trashing Democratic registrations in Oregon, Nevada and parts of Pennsylvania. The company also provided the Bush campaign with an additional service.
According to Alternet,
Sproul collaborated with a GCJPR employee who is a White House consultant on a scheme to get independent candidate Ralph Nader on the Arizona Ballot, as a spoiler.
Last spring, one of GCJPR’s executives, who is an advisory board member of Bush’s re-election campaign, served as the chair of a ballot campaign Sproul was quarterbacking, while, according to the source, Sproul collaborated with a GCJPR employee who is a White House consultant on a scheme to get independent candidate Ralph Nader on the Arizona ballot. In both instances, Sproul’s company, Voter Outreach of America, was involved in gathering signatures.
Former employees of Voter Outreach of America in Oregon accused the company of shredding thousands of registrations forms by people wishing to register as Democrats. In West Virginia, the company instructed its employees to mislead people into registering Republican and voting for Bush. In Oregon, the state attorney general opened a criminal investigation into allegations that the Sproul and Associates subsidiary intentionally discarded and destroyed Democrats’ registration forms.
One might be tempted to question the veracity of claims made by former employees. However, when one considers the pattern of behavior over at least a couple of election cycles, and the various criminal investigations for strikingly similar alleged illegal activity, the evidence is difficult to ignore.
Fast forward to 2012. This time, Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee. Sproule is back with a different company, but providing the same services. Once again, he is providing voter registration services for the Republican Presidential candidate and the GOP in several of the battle ground states: North Carolina, Florida, Colorado and Virginia.
According to Blue NC, Strategic Allied Consulting has attempted to mask its identity from curious onlookers by changing its domain registration to private. However, Greg Flynn screen grabbed the domain’s information before the changes took effect. Here it is in all its glory.
Blue NC reports that North Carolina’s Republican Party federal fund paid Strategic Allied Consulting $333,267.50
There is yet another investigation , suggesting that Strategic Allied Consulting has added a new trick to its Voter Registration fraud repertoire. This time it’s in Palm Beach County, Florida. This time, 106 suspicious voter registration applications were submitted to the County’s Supervisor of Elections, Susan Bucher by an employee of Strategic Allied Consulting.
According to Brad blog:
The forms were said to all have similar signatures, changed addresses and party affiliations, and other defects which appear to have all been done by the same hand.
Bucher is reported to have turned the suspicious applications over to Florida’s State Attorney during a meeting earlier this week.
According to Open Secrets.org, Strategic Allied Consulting’s fee was the highest expenditure incurred by Florida’s Republican Party. The firm was paid $667,598.
Top Vendors/Recipients
|
Rank |
Vendor/Recipient |
Total Expenditures |
| 1 | Strategic Allied Consulting | $667,598 |
| 2 | Airnet Group | $121,891 |
| 3 | Grissom, Michael | $56,250 |
| 4 | Curry, Leonard | $47,920 |
| 5 | Webelectnet | $40,200 |
| 6 | SunTrust Banks | $31,065 |
| 7 | Premium Service Account | $27,751 |
| 8 | Victory Group | $25,000 |
| 9 | Riley, George | $21,248 |
| 10 | Cleary, Kevin | $19,459 |
The case in Palm Beach County is strikingly similar to another event, earlier this year in Sacramento where 1,000 fraudulent voter registration forms were turned in to Sacramento County’s Registrar by Momentum Political Services, a group hired by California’s Republican Party.
According to the Brad Blog, California Secretary of State’s Election Fraud Division was reportedly investigating that case.
Those tactics show the extent of Republican desperation with the disastrous Romney campaign. They also illustrate that Republicans care more about winning by any means, including unethical ones, than they care about the integrity of the election system. It doesn’t end there. Voter Integrity NC and the Tea Party (read Koch financed) “grassroots” organization True The Vote are diligently working to have voters purged from the rolls. True The Vote is also setting up something called “poll watchers” who, no matter how you spin it, will serve the purpose of intimidating voters.
As the Huffington Post reports: True the Vote wants voters to feel like they’re “driving and seeing the police following you.” They aim to recruit one million of something called “poll watchers” around the country.
It is the Romney’s turn and they are not going to get a little thing like a free and fair election get in their way.
Republicans want to turn back several clocks to the “good old days” in which voting was a privilege reserved for white men, who are ideally rich. Think Jim Crowe, “Little House on the Prairie” and the Roman Empire all wrapped in one ideological package.
Of course, they won’t say it. Rather, they will talk about a desire to protect the system from the fictional boogey man of in- person voter fraud.
Registration fraud, on the other hand, is a familiar tool in the Republican Party’s bag of tricks.
Image: TNR
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24 Responses to Thousands of Fake Republicans Are Being Registered by Romney and the GOP
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Grovegal
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 12:58 pm
What’s the solution to stop this? What can the American people do?
What can the Justice Department do?
We need solutions and action to this nefarious takeover.
Sandra
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Isn’t this a criminal offence? If so, why are these people not in jail but allowed to carry on business as usual?
Brigita Petrutis
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:06 pm
This is the tip of the iceberg. A diversion. We must look much more closely.
Echelon
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:08 pm
So maybe that’s why Romney is confident he will win despite the polling that predicts otherwise.
Sarahthequitter
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 3:02 pm
BINGO, the fix is in people, Rmoney will be appointed by the SCOTUS, and he knows it…hence the smirk.
KJB
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:12 pm
If “True the Vote” shows up at my polling place, they’re going to have me breathing down their neck ALL DAY LONG!!
LaurelS
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Thank you for posting this story. :D
Jim Faubel
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:27 pm
The Republicans realize that they can’t win without cheating (Voter IDs, voter fraud, voter “purges”, etc).
Here’s my solution. Let everyone go ahead and register as Republican but VOTE DEMOCRAT!
Jonathan Burton
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:36 pm
If this goes all the way up to the RNC. Then there needs to be an investigation of the RNC then. That and this story needs to break, big time!!!
Calma
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 1:49 pm
ballotbandits.wordpress.c...
TigerLily
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
This needs to go to MSNBC and all the media outlets to let people know we have all been ripped off for years by the GOP. Anyone associated with these con artists should be very ashamed of themselves. And let me tell you..YOU ARE NOT A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN DOING THIS EITHER…they should all go to jail. Something needs to be done NOW!
Gracie B
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 3:41 pm
How are they going to vote without voter ID? Fake ID? Provided by whom? Really concerned about the people who think they are registered and are not. If you can, do it in person, yourself.
playaspec
Sep. 30th, 2012 at 1:31 am
> How are they going to vote without voter ID? Fake ID? Provided by whom?
Who needs an ID when we use insecure electronic voting machines? This scam needs two pieces. A registration itself is worthless unless you can cast it’s vote. Requiring a body for each bogus registration is cumbersome unless you already have your fingers inside the electronic tally system. See:
www.salon.com/2011/09/27/...
It’s trivial to modify an entry in a database, from anywhere in the world, provided the entry is already there. This is but one prong on a multi pronged attack on our Democracy. Many more are covered here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9...
William Carr
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 3:46 pm
The real question is, WHY ?
We know how ACORN got stuck with unwanted false registration forms.
The contractors were trying to fill a quota.
Maybe that’s all that’s happening here.
Why else would it be happening?
Of course, it makes it look like the Republican Party has more registered voters than they really do.
But unless someone can come up with a scheme where that would benefit them, I don’t see this as serious.
Now, if it wasn’t for Citizens United, I’d think they were making up fake donors to funnel corporate cash through, but they no longer have any motivation to do so.
I’ve figured out that trying to swing a State would require on the tens of thousands of double-voters, strategically sited only in the “swing” Precincts.
The chance of getting caught would be tremendous; only idiots would believe that would work.
Unless the Republicans have a math-challenged idiot running a secret campaign, I think this is just the contractor ripping off the Party.
playaspec
Sep. 30th, 2012 at 1:39 am
> it makes it look like the Republican Party has more registered voters than they really do.
>But unless someone can come up with a scheme where that would benefit them, I don’t see this as serious.
The *have* come up with a scheme. Rigged Diebold electronic voting machines. Once they have a few thousand extra bogus voters on the rolls, it’s a few clicks at the keyboard and the election has been swung.
What surprises me, is that there is *NO ONE* in *any* of out esteemed three letter law enforcement/intelligence agencies that aren’t hip to this. Perhaps they’re being kept too busy chasing brown bogey men or covering the tracks of bankers.
Patrick Mckenzie
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 4:20 pm
I would say that if someone approaches you trying to register you to vote, that you attempt to get their name and who they are working for and document it, preferably on cell phone video and audio (as long as single party audio recording is legal in your state).
Once you have that, go ahead and register with them and then later check to see if you are registered at one of the sites like this, www.canivote.org/
Any abnormalities should be immediately reported to the police.
mycotropicq
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 4:28 pm
This is hyperbole; “True The Vote is also setting up something called “poll watchers” who, no matter how you spin it, will serve the purpose of intimidating voters.”
Poll watchers are volunteers, usually local party members, that are allowed to record the names of the voters who have already voted. Not their party, just the name. They then take those names back to their call center and remove them so that party workers don’t spend time calling people that already voted. I’m a Democrat and I do this every election for my house district.
The rest of the article points out how pathetic and desperate the Republicans are this year and ANYONE suppressing the vote in ANY way should serve time for it.
Pepper17
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 9:09 pm
True the vote is not a typical poll watching group. Their goal is to intimidate voters.
Maxine Guerry
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 7:38 pm
If my memory serves me correct, Bush won Florida because the voting machines had been tampered with. People who voted a straight Democrat ticket found out afterwards that they had voted a straight Republican ticket. The Republican politicians are becoming like the Mafia — they’re crooks.
Heidi
Sep. 27th, 2012 at 10:16 pm
Republicans: You will not win this election in any shape or form. The American People will not allow you to cheat, steal and lie your way into the White House, Period!!!
Kirstine Hughes
Sep. 28th, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Why isn’t this guy Sproule in jail? He has a history of doing this, the media is talking about it and he isn’t crying foul (slander, libel or anything of the sort) so why hasn’t he been prosecuted and jailed? And, what is the penalty for this crime? It should be astronomically large to discourage this kind of thing to erode our democracy. Life in prison for endangering our voting system makes sense, because the deterent has to be balanced with the severity of the crime. This kind of effort is worth a great deal more than a wrist slapping!
cheryl
Sep. 28th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
Romney is convinced he is going to win. I imagine he knows exactly how the deck is going to be stacked.
David B. Hinson
Sep. 28th, 2012 at 6:09 pm
GIVES THIS STORY MORE CREDIBILITY- the REDs have been doing this for years. the REDs aka party of liars
Ridge accuses Bush White House of political use of terror alert system
In his new book, the first Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, accuses top aides to President George W. Bush of pressing him to raise the terror alert level to influence the 2004 presidential election.
Ridge, a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, says that he refused the entreaty just before the election from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to a summary of the book from publisher Thomas Dunne Books.
Ridge writes that there was a “vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion” about raising the threat level. He says his aides told the White House that doing so would politicize national security.
“I believe our strong interventions had pulled the ‘go-up’ advocates back from the brink,” Ridge writes. “But I consider the episode to be not only a dramatic moment in Washington’s recent history, but another illustration of the intersection of politics, fear, credibility and security.”
Rob Headley
Oct. 1st, 2012 at 2:03 am
Where is the Justice Dept. ? The National Guard should be posted at all polling places to stop right-wingers who try to intimidate voters. We should ALL contact our local offices to confirm we are still registered. Avoid voting absentee or a provisional ballot as they do NOT get counted unless there is a recount ordered. Yes, that’s TRUE! They DO NOT get counted!