Saturday, September 29, 2012

GOP Voter Registration Firm Turns in Thousands of 'Invalid' Registration Forms in California

Besides the excuse to pass laws that make it harder to vote, for people who are more likely to vote Democratic, those faulty voter registration can cause a person to believe they have registered to vote, so they don't actually get registered.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9291

By Brad Friedman on 5/4/2012

You're unlikely to hear a peep about this on Fox "News" (unless they happen to have me on), but the California Secretary of State's Election Fraud Division is now reportedly investigating a firm hired by the Sacramento County Republican Party said to have submitted thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms.

According to a report today from Sacramento ABC affiliate News10 [see video posted below], a private, for-profit firm calling itself Momentum Political Services, hired by the local Republican Party "to boost GOP registration ranks in key battleground communities" has turned in more than 3,100 invalid voter registration cards during their recent drive.

[UPDATE 5/7/12: According to Sacramento Bee's 5/5/12 report, the number of bad registration forms is much higher than 3,100. The paper reports that since September, out of some 31,000 cards turned in by Momentum Political Services, "at least one-fourth of them have been thrown out because of inaccuracies," according to the Sacramento Registrar of Voters. That puts the questionable registrations from the GOP's company at more than 7,500.]

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The charges of serial voter registration fraud sound very similar to those leveled in 2008 against another outfit hired by the California State GOP to register Republican voters before that year's Presidential election. In that case, the head of the firm was arrested, and eventually pleaded guilty to voter registration charges himself.

In 2006, another firm hired by the CA Republican Party turned in thousands of registration forms with fake names and an error rate as high as 60 percent. And in 2004, a firm hired by the GOP was investigated in a number of states for shredding Democratic voter registrations and tossing them into dumpsters. Despite those allegations, the same folks were later hired by the McCain/Palin campaign in 2008 to run voter registration drives before the Presidential election.

Of course, you probably haven't heard of any of those stories, even while you've heard plenty about a handful of ACORN workers --- no actual ACORN officials, mind you, and they were never hired by the Democratic Party, and never led to a fraudulent vote --- turning in fraudulent registration forms in past years.

But nobody who ever worked for the non-profit ACORN has ever been accused of what these Republican firms continue to do on behalf of the Republican officials who hire them, paying them per Republican registration, year after year, as is once again apparent in the allegations surfacing today against Momentum Political Services.

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And in some instances, the voter's party affiliation appears to have been changed, by someone, to Republican.

"The circulator signed in blue ink, and it just happens that the party is checked in a blue ink," said [Sacramento County registrar of voters Jill] LaVine during an examination of one suspicious card. "The voter did the rest [of the card] in black ink."

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Contrast that with the non-partisan ACORN which actually developed a system to try and confirm the legitimacy of each and every voter registration form they collected, flag the ones they could not be confirmed as "potentially fraudulent," before turning them in (as required by law), along with the names of workers who had defrauded them to election officials and law enforcement agencies.

Nonetheless, ACORN was described hyperbolically by John McCain himself during the GOP's 2008 version of the "ACORN 'Voter Fraud' Hoax" as "one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country" which, he said, was "destroying the fabric of democracy."

Never mind that the rates of fraudulent voter registration forms turned in by firms hired by Republicans are far greater than any of those turned in (and flagged as fraudulent!) by ACORN --- 60% versus less than 1% --- or the fact that McCain was the keynote speaker at an ACORN rally in 2006 --- before he became the GOP Presidential nominee --- when he lauded the four-decade old community organization by telling them that they were "what makes America special."

Meanwhile, in California, where the GOP has long paid "bounties" for Republican-only registrations, Momentum Political Services appears to have actually signed voters up as Republicans whether they wished to be affiliated with the party or not,

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Fraud by voter registration firms hired by the Republican Party in California seems to be a serial problem, occurring in very similar patterns election year after election year.

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All-in-all, the rates of invalid and/or fraudulent registration forms and signatures by these firms, often as high as 60%, have proven far in excess of the "greatest frauds in voter history," as the disingenuous McCain had described ACORN. For the record, after being pressed on that fraudulent claim in the days just prior to the Presidential Election in 2008, a member of what McCain had laughably called his "McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee" was forced to concede that he was unable to cite a single instance in which a fraudulent ACORN registration had led to an illegal vote.

"Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can't cite one," said the former election official turned member of McCain's committee.

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It's a time-tested Republican scam. Claim Democrats are committing voter fraud, even while you're doing it yourself, use the false claims to deny Democrats their right to vote (via disenfranchising polling place Photo ID laws or voter caging) and then, if someone in the media actually bothers to press you on it, admit you can't cite any actual examples of any of it.

After the late Rightwing con-man Andrew Breibart had paid hoaxster James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles to create faked hit videos on ACORN, which eventually brought down the four-decade old advocacy group for low and middle-income Americans, then former Speaker of the House, now former Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich feigned outrage in a 2009 op-ed.

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Move the clock forward to 2012 and Gingrich himself, after his campaign had submitted thousands of admittedly fraudulent signatures to the state of Virginia in his unsuccessful attempt to qualify for the GOP Presidential Primary in his home state last March, referred to those 1,500 fraudulent signatures as little more than a "mistake".

"We turned in 11,100 --- we needed 10,000 --- 1,500 of them were by one guy who, frankly, committed fraud," Gingrich is seen and heard saying in video originally aired by CNN.

Gingrich's rate of fraud was far higher, once again, than anything ACORN was ever accused of, even though they were forced to shut their doors after the phony Breitbart/O'Keefe videos which Gingrich had lauded.

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