More details are emerging on the situation in Virginia, where an employee of the Republican National Committee has been arrested on several felony counts of trashing voter registration forms. First of all, more people are now coming forward in other parts of the state saying that their registration forms were apparently not turned in.
This morning I had a chance to interview someone who I will identify for now by her first name. Lucy is a student at James Madison University, and she comes from the Northern Virginia area where she was registered to vote. About 2-3 weeks ago, Lucy saw a voter registration table on campus when she was walking in between classes. She stopped to fill out a voter registration form to change her voting address from her parents house in Fairfax to her dorm address in Harrisonburg so she could vote in person on election day.
On Wednesday night Lucy went online to check her voter registration status and found out she had not been registered in Harrisonburg- meaning whoever was collecting her form on campus had not turned it in.
This is now a THIRD location where we are hearing about voters in this area being falsely registered. The forms that were collected from the dumpster on Monday that led to the recent indictment came from a local street festival and a registration at the local community college.
And the LA Times is reporting that Colin Small, the guy now under arrest, worked for Strategic Allied Consulting, the company the RNC has fired in several states after reports of fraudulent voter registrations and other abnormalities showed up all over the country. But when that company was fired, the RNC continued the same operations with the same people, just moving the SAC employees over to themselves. That’s why Small was working for them:
Colin Small, 31, was working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee. Small, of Phoenixville, Pa., was first hired by Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm that was fired by the party after suspect voter forms surfaced in Florida and other states…
After Sproul was dumped, the registration operation that he assembled continued working under the supervision of party officials, Spicer said. He said the workers will continue to do get-out-the-vote work until the election.
This is gonna get bigger, I guarantee it. There’s little chance that this was an isolated situation, one rogue employee.
26 comments
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Gregory in Seattle
October 22, 2012 at 1:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Good thing we have voter ID laws to stop actual election fraud.
Oh, wait….
Didaktylos
October 22, 2012 at 1:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Let us hope that this is the first pebble of a landslide
Jasper of Maine (I feel safe and welcome at FTB)
October 22, 2012 at 1:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Voter ID laws are like putting up a “No bears allowed” sign on your property to ward off bears.
matty1
October 22, 2012 at 1:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
By ‘get-out-the vote’ he presumably meant ‘remove the vote’.
John Hinkle
October 22, 2012 at 1:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m sure O’Keefe’s sooper top secret video sting will be hitting Youtube any day now.
*checks Project Veritas on youtube*
Well, it’s not there yet. Probably held up in post production editing, you know, so nothing is misrepresented.
kantalope
October 22, 2012 at 1:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ha – just shows that you effete elitists libruls can’t get anything right: “Oh, there’s no voter fraud.” “We don’t need no new ID laws to deal with a problem that does not exist.”
Any Right thinking, Rush Limbaugh listening, gun toting Conservative could have taken you right out back of the Republican Headquarters and shown you voter fraud in action.
Losers.
grumpyoldfart
October 22, 2012 at 1:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Will officials keep a tally of the number of people who turn up to vote, only to discover that their registrations haven’t been recorded properly – or does that sort of information get swept under the carpet?
Mr. Upright
October 22, 2012 at 1:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Luckily she’ll still be able to vote at home (by absentee, if it’s not too late). This should help her credibility. They can’t say she’s disgruntled about missing the deadline to register.
jeremydiamond
October 22, 2012 at 2:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
But will it get bigger in time to damage the GOP?
Raging Bee
October 22, 2012 at 2:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Voter ID laws are like putting up a “No bears allowed” sign on your property to ward off bears.
That doesn’t work for bears, but it does work for humans, because humans can read an intimidating message on a billboard.
sinned34
October 22, 2012 at 3:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
But… But… Both sides do it!
mommiest
October 22, 2012 at 3:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve done voter reg in Virginia; the forms include a receipt which is to be given to the person who registers. If the registration doesn’t go through, the person should have the receipt with the name of the organization who was supposed to turn the form in. We have pre-printed receipts with our contact info that we hand over. How much you wanna bet the Rethuglicans didn’t bother with this, or only turned in those forms for which receipts had been given?
Anneliese
October 22, 2012 at 3:32 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It looks like there will be no prosecution.
Gregory in Seattle
October 22, 2012 at 4:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Anneliese #13 – Which opens the possibility — not that I’m expecting the Democrats to actually show any backbone, mind you — of bringing in the federal government to investigate: most of Virginia is still subject to enhanced oversight under the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 federal law designed to punish shenanigans like this. The Act was designed to deal with racial discrimination in matters of voting. Throwing away voter registration forms of anyone who has stated a preference for or is otherwise deemed likely to vote for an African American would certainly seem to fall under the Act’s jurisdiction.
dontpanic
October 22, 2012 at 5:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah, I wouldn’t put it past them to make a stink that in doing so “she’s voting in the wrong district” and try to intimidate her into not voting by intimating that by voting at home she’s violating residency requirements. After all by registering at school she’d admitted she doesn’t meet the criteria for voting at home. Nice catch 22.
Gregory in Seattle
October 22, 2012 at 5:33 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And here you thought only third-world dictatorships needed international supervision to hold elections: see here and at Daily Kos (look for Eight civil rights groups ask UN partner to monitor elections.) From the article:
Needless to say, the conservatives who have been working so hard to suppress and intimidate progressive voters are screeching bloody murder.
Anneliese
October 22, 2012 at 5:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Thanks @Gregory #14 I did not realize that the Voting rights Act would apply there. It is shameful that the VA authorities are not acting. Someone needs to be smacked with a clue-by-4.
kantalope
October 22, 2012 at 5:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just goes to show “law and order republicans” don’t mean any of those things.
Can you imagine what would happen to Nixon if those allegations were brought up today? Yeah, nuthin.
imthegenieicandoanything
October 22, 2012 at 6:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
They do this because they’re bad human beings, empty of anything but the air that makes them appear to be something other than human-shaped hot-air balloons.
They’re stupid enough not to care.
left0ver1under
October 22, 2012 at 9:26 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As a Canadian, I have to wonder why it’s legal in the US for non-governmental groups to be involved in voter registration at all.
Yes, activists and political parties can encourage people to vote in Canada, but only Elections Canada enumerators are permitted to register people, whether going door to door or at a government office.
True story:
I was at home working in the yard one day (about 15 years ago) and saw two people wearing suits going door to door. I heard a few others on my street telling them to “**** off!” when the doors opened, before the two had said anything.
They came to my place, and I said, “You’ve been hearing that all day, haven’t you?” They nodded yes.
Unlike my neighbors who saw the two only from their windows and thought they were proselytizers, I had seen the “Elections Canada” sticker on the side of their briefcase.
laurentweppe
October 23, 2012 at 6:24 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sooooo, now I understand the Acorn tantrum more: it was a case of “We’re trying to rig elections, so the other guys must be doing the same thing“
Chiroptera
October 23, 2012 at 6:40 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
left0ver1under, #20: As a Canadian, I have to wonder why it’s legal in the US for non-governmental groups to be involved in voter registration at all.
Because here in the US, we have a great fear of the government and are convinced that all employees of the government are incompetent or corrupt.
And, yes, the irony in that statement is so obvious that I am well aware of it.
stace
October 23, 2012 at 7:38 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just another step in the process of cementing our banana republic status.
matty1
October 23, 2012 at 8:06 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What happened to the story Robert Mugabe was planning to send election monitors to the US?
Chiroptera
October 23, 2012 at 8:46 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
stace, 23: Just another step in the process of cementing our banana republic status.
But remember, because of our free speech protections, fascism is not taking root in America!
Marcus Ranum
October 23, 2012 at 1:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As Stalin said, “the vote-count doesn’t matter as much as the vote counter.”