Thousands of Fake Republicans Are Being Registered by Romney and the GOP

Last updated on September 28th, 2012 at 10:16 pm

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.

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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.

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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

Adalia Woodbury

Former contributor.