Nevada GOP Begins the Cheating Process

Nathan Sproul of Sproul & Associates
Nathan Sproul of Sproul & Associates in Phoenix, Arizona is behind the criminal election activity.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/13/32821/029

Sproul's illegal activities in libraries exposed:

http://www.nifl.gov/nifl-womenlit/2004/0201.html

I-Team report on voter registration fraud - Part II
I-Team report on voter registration fraud - Part II
written by: Deborah Sherman (I-Team Reporter) and Nicole Vap (Executive Producer Investigative)
Created: 10/12/2004 7:08 PM MDT - Updated: 10/12/2004 10:20 PM MDT

DENVER - Authorities are calling for criminal charges and change following a 9News I-Team investigation showing widespread voter registration fraud in Colorado.

In fact, officials say the people in the I-Team report should go to jail. Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter told 9News Tuesday afternoon his office is investigating some 200 questionable voter registration applications. "People are trying to corrupt the election process. People should be prosecuted," Ritter said.

Our I-Team investigation found some voter registration workers signed-up people dozens of times for money. And some of those who registered aren't even allowed to vote. Workers forged signatures, made up addresses or changed legitimate voter information, many times without voters ever knowing it.

Kym Cason told 9News she registered herself 25 times and her friends 40 times. Cason claims she was trying to help her boyfriend earn money. He worked for a group called ACORN that paid workers by the hour but had a 5 application per hour quota. Cason told 9News, "everybody needs an extra dollar here now and they need to make their quota for the day."

Jim Fleshman, the regional supervisor for ACORN, told 9News tonight that the organization would fire any worker who did not deliver the required 5 applications per hour. ACORN claims to be a nonpartisan organization that works with low-income families.

9News also found a few bogus forms from the New Voters Project and the Colorado Progressive Coalition.

The group Fair Vote Colorado is encouraging people to go to its website and check their registration. Spokesperson Mark Eddy told 9News today, "This election, more than any other, has the possibility for confusion and mistakes to be made and we just want to be sure that people have an opportunity to correct those mistakes before the election." Fair Vote Colorado will have an Election Day "war room" set up. It will have lawyers standing by to talk to voters having difficulty voting at the polls. Their phone number is 888-839-4301 or you can go to www.fairvotecolorado.org.

You can also call your County Clerk to verify your information...but we've learned clerks will still be entering registrations up until Election Day.

Got a lot for ya here. from www.metafilter.com .


Voters Outreach of America AKA America Votes tears up Democratic voter registration forms in Nevada.



Sproul & Associates AKA America Votes workers in WV and PA refuse to register Kerry voters.

Democrats in Oregon have complained that canvassers for Arizona based Sproul & Associates have been pressuring residents to register as Republicans so that they can get paid.

Arizona Nader campaign was assisted in its petition drive by an unlikely figure: the ultra-conservative former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, Nathan Sproul.

Good background story on Sproul and his political track record, cached on Google.

Here is the direct link between Sproul and Voters Outreach of America:According to several sources, two of the contractors Sproul hired to oversee petition gathering for No Taxpayer Money For Politicians -- Aaron "A.J." James, who directs Voters' Outreach of America, and Diane Burns -- were also paid by Sproul to get as many signatures as possible for Nader.

Now, the real question is, who is paying Sproul for his national voter fraud efforts?

According to KLAS-TV in Las Vegas,
"The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee."

This help wanted ad for Voters Outreach of America
says "Paid for by the Republican National Committee" too.

They've also received almost a half a million dollars from the RNC:

SPROUL & ASSOCIATES,INC $160,001 8/25/2004 POLITICAL CONSULTING

SPROUL & ASSOCIATES,INC $27,916 8/13/2004 POLITICAL CONSULTING

SPROUL & ASSOCIATES,INC $99,135 8/11/2004 POLITICAL CONSULTING

SPROUL & ASSOCIATES,INC $181,905 8/4/2004 POLITICAL CONSULTING

SPROUL & ASSOCIATES,INC $20,000 7/14/2004 POLITICAL CONSULTING



Do some research, people! This is truly ridiculous. I'm really starting to doubt this election is going to go off as planned...

Cycloptichorn

Nice job, Cycloptichorn.

Thanks
C, Thanks for helping to find the details of this massive GOP criminal election fraud.

BBB

Democrats, Republicans Charge Vote Improprieties
October 13, 2004
Democrats, Republicans Charge Vote Improprieties
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:23 p.m. ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Democrats on Wednesday charged that the national Republican party was linked to a group accused of trying to stop Democrats from registering to vote in at least two Western battleground states, Nevada and Oregon.

The accusations come as voters rush to meet registration deadlines and election officials around the country report surging registrations, with just three weeks to go in the cliffhanger U.S. presidential campaign.

``We have learned from news reports that a Republican organization, Voters Outreach for America, has been registering voters and then ripping up the forms when registers identify themselves as Democrats,'' Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe said in a telephone briefing.

``According to the news reports, the groups have been largely, if not entirely, funded by the Republican National Committee,'' McAuliffe said.

The Republican National Committee said in a statement it had a ``zero tolerance policy for anything that smacks of impropriety in registering voters.''

It accused the Democrats of applying ``selective outrage'' and said Democrat-aligned groups had also faced allegations of ``systemic voter registration fraud.'' The Republican statement cited the progressive group ACORN, which says on its Web site it has registered 200,000 new voters this election cycle and made ``non-partisan'' get-out-the vote appeals.

ACORN officials have said they have tightened procedures to reduce errors.

The reports from Nevada and Oregon, and similar concerns expressed in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Maine and Missouri, were the latest in a series of alleged campaign dirty tricks involving groups aligned to both major parties.

Election officials in several states have turned over thousands of suspicious voter registration forms for investigation, many of them with bogus addresses, fictitious names or forged signatures.

In Oregon, authorities said they planned to investigate allegations made to a Portland television station by a canvasser hired by Arizona-based Sproul & Associates. The man said he had been instructed to accept only Republican voter registration forms.

The canvasser said he might throw out Democratic registrations since he was not going to get paid for them.

Sproul & Associates, headed by Nathan Sproul, a former executive director of the Arizona state Republican Party, has been linked to Voters Outreach.

In Las Vegas, a former employee of Voters Outreach told a local television station he witnessed a company supervisor taking registration forms signed by Democrats out of a pile and ripping them up.

But in a statement, Sproul said that employee had been fired. Other staff had said no voter registration forms were destroyed and that all had been turned over to state officials in Nevada, including over 500 for Democrats and Independents in the past month, the consulting firm said.

A Republican party spokeswoman confirmed that it had hired Sproul and had paid him for work in registering voters. The party said it had spoken to Sproul since the allegations surfaced but declined to specify whether any action would be taken against him.

``We have a zero-tolerance policy. Anyone who engages in fraudulent voter registration activities should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,'' said RNC spokeswoman Christine Iverson.

McAuliffe said the Democratic party in Nevada planned to file a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking ``relief for voters who were victimized, whose cards were ripped up.''

He denied that the Democratic party was linked to improper registration activities. ``This is an issue because the RNC (Republican party) is involved itself directly in the funding. This is not some outside group. The DNC has never been involved in any activity like this,'' he said.

Milwaukee Extra Ballot Request Rejected
Milwaukee Extra Ballot Request Rejected
Wednesday October 13, 2004 5:01 PM
The Guardian UK

MILWAUKEE (AP) - The mayor has requested more ballots for the Nov. 2 election, but the county executive has refused to provide them, citing concerns about voter fraud.

Mayor Tom Barrett complained that the 679,000 ballots the county agreed to print were less than the number prepared for elections in 2000 and 2002. He asked for almost 260,000 additional ballots, expecting a large turnout next month.

But in a letter, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker said he had ``serious questions'' about the need for that many ballots because the city reported having 382,000 registered voters in September. He said ``chaos'' could occur at understaffed polling places where voters could grab ballots.

City officials said the request for additional ballots was an effort to prevent shortages because some wards have run out in the past. They say some ballots will be ``spoiled'' by voters' mistakes, and Wisconsin's same-day voter registration makes turnout unpredictable.

``I'm going to lay this at the footsteps of the county if there aren't enough ballots in the city,'' Barrett said.

By law, the county pays for and prints ballots.

Barrett and Walker both hold nonpartisan offices, but Walker is a state co-chairman of President Bush's campaign, and Barrett is state co-chairman of Sen. John Kerry's campaign.

New York Times OP-ED COLUMNIST
Block the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 15, 2004

Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.

The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.

Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.

Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.

But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.

That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.

And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.

Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late.

Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.

The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.

In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.

And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.

Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast by blacks. And there's strong evidence that this spoilage didn't reflect voters' incompetence: it was caused mainly by defective voting machines and may also reflect deliberate vote-tampering.

The important point to realize is that these abuses aren't aberrations. They're the inevitable result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will persist until voters - whose will still does count, if expressed strongly enough - hold that party accountable.

Oh god. This election is gonna be so damn ugly. No matter who wins, it's going to be doubted and debated and won't even stop when the votes are tallied.

<shudders>

Yes, considering how busy the Democrats have been LOL.

Talk about ugly.

Workers who left in ballot flap join Bush
Workers who left in ballot flap join Bush
By TERRY WOSTER and DAVID KRANZ
Argus Leader

published: 10/15/2004

Larry Russell, 3 others move to Ohio campaign

South Dakota campaign official who resigned after questions arose over absentee-ballot applications will work in Ohio for the Bush-Cheney campaign, an internal Republican Party memo indicates.

Larry Russell, who was chairman of the South Dakota Republican Party's get-out-the-vote operation, resigned this week after questions were raised about the validity of some of the 1,400 absentee-ballot applications gathered, largely on college campuses, by the program Russell led.

Students on campuses in Brookings, Vermillion,

Yankton and Spearfish have questioned the absentee-ballot application process, saying young men obtained their applications, but the notarization of the documents carried the signature of a woman.

The South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation has been interviewing several people about the matter.

No charges have been filed as a result of the probe, which Attorney General Larry Long on Thursday would only say "is continuing."

When South Dakota Republican Party Chairman Randy Frederick announced the resignations of Russell and five others Monday evening, he said the state party has a "zero-tolerance policy."

But an internal Republican Party memo obtained by the Argus Leader said Russell would be going to Cleveland "to lead the ground operations" for President Bush and Vice President Cheney there.

Ohio is a swing state considered vital to a successful presidential victory.

Attempts to contact Bush-Cheney campaign officials in Cleveland were unsuccessful.

The memo was e-mailed to Republican staffers and officials Sunday evening by the state

party's Executive Director Jason Glodt. Three other GOP workers who resigned over the application fracas also will be involved in the Ohio campaign, according to the memo.

"Todd Schleckeway, Nathan Mertz and Eric Fahrendorf have also been recruited to Ohio to work with Larry on the President's campaign," the e-mail

stated.

Russell's work praised

The state Republican Party accepted the resignations of Russell, another GOP staffer and four contract workers after the questions were raised about absentee-ballot applications. Those who resigned were involved in Republican Victory campaign, a get-out-the-vote effort.

Glodt confirmed Thursday that the memo is authentic, but he said he'd prefer not to comment on an internal communication.

In the memo, Glodt praises Russell's work in South Dakota.

"Larry has done an excellent job building our organization in South Dakota and he is confident we can get the job done in the next 23 days," he wrote.

Fahrendorf was a party employee. Schleckeway and Mertz were independent contractors working on the get-out-the-vote operation. Independent contractors Joe Alick and Rachel M. Hoff, whose notary seal and signature are on some of the questioned applications, also resigned but were not mentioned in the memo.

'We didn't miss a beat'

Dick Wadhams, Republican Senate candidate John Thune's campaign manager, said the Victory operation is running strong even though the key players are absent.

Russell was replaced by Herb Jones, who ran Thune's 2002 Senate campaign.

"We didn't miss a beat. Herb Jones in on the job, and everything is running fine," Wadhams said.

Russell's new job puts him in an enviable situation, Wadhams said.

"Ohio is on everybody's short list as a battleground state, so it is the place to be," he said.

Alan Clem, retired University of South Dakota political science professor, said Cleveland probably isn't a bad place to land.

"He isn't going to have much of a future in South Dakota," he said. "My impression is, there were some young Republicans in the last few years who got a little cocky, upset some people. I suppose (Russell) is persona non grata in this state."

On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Jesse Abbott, a student at Black Hills State University, said a man approached him in his dorm about applying for an absentee ballot, but a woman's name, Jennifer Giannonatti, was on the notarization portion of the document.

Glodt said Giannonatti had been a contract worker for the

party last spring, but "by the time this happened, she wasn't employed by the Republican Party. So she wasn't on our list.''

Glodt said Giannonatti was working for the state's College Republicans in the get-out-the-vote program this fall.

Collecting photo IDs

Any applications she may have processed are among the 1,400 the party already has identified in a direct-mail program to contact students who applied for ballots and to urge them to return a copy of a photo identification. The law requires a copy of the ID or a notary's signature on an absentee-ballot application.

The GOP decided earlier in the week to contact each of the 1,400 applicants by mail. If the voter returns an identification, the party will match the document with the original application in each auditor's office, Glodt said.

"We were doing this statewide already,'' he said. "We're confident that the large majority of those (applications) are valid, that the large majority were done properly. ... Regardless, since there would be no way to differentiate which ones weren't done properly and the ones that were done properly, we're collecting photo IDs for all of them processed by the Victory campaign.''

He also noted that each of the applicants was a qualified voter who wanted an absentee ballot.

Lawrence County States Attorney John Fitzgerald, whose jurisdiction includes Spearfish, where Black Hills State University is located, said Thursday he hasn't received any complaints about ballot application problems.

Clay County States Attorney Tami Bern in Vermillion, home of the University of South Dakota, said she hasn't received complaints, either.

"None of the people who have made an application have made a complaint to us, and if they did, we would refer them to the DCI (Division of Criminal Investigation) investigation,'' she said.

Earlier, Yankton County States Attorney Bob Chavis said his office had 18 questionable applications.

A DCI agent has been investigating complaints in Brookings County, where South Dakota State University is located. States Attorney Clyde Calhoon said he hasn't received the results of that investigation yet.

Brown County Auditor Maxine Taylor said she isn't aware of any complaints arising at Northern State University.

Secretary of State Chris Nelson said a county auditor's duty is to review the application only to make sure that all information required is included. The auditors aren't expected to go beyond that to such steps as verifying the identity of a notary, for example.

"The only thing we have told them as a group at this point is that if voters send copies of their identification, you should certainly accept those,'' Nelson said. "And, at this point, that's the only special instruction we've given them as a group.''

He wouldn't speculate on future directions of the investigation.

"I don't know where it's going, either," Nelson said, "other than I know they're working hard."