per USA GATE 'voter fraud' explanations

[salin]

this line of rationale for complaints has been irritating to read per the projection of the allegations in the 2004 elections. I clearly recall reports in state after state of a paid voter registration outfit that was accused of tampering with the registrations. When I read the Newsweek piece which ties the republican charges to voter suppression efforts via challenging voter registration efforts of ACORN - I decided to try to find some of those stories.

On another thread I started posting local news stories from October 2004 - about the efforts and the name I was trying to recall surfaced: Nathan Sproul.

In my very quick search I found items from Nevada, Oregon and West Virginia. Then I found this piece coauthored by Mark Crispin Miller:

RNC VOTE FRAUD?
Team Bush Paid Millions to Nathan Sproul—and Tried to Hide It
by Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas

In the months before the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group--run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party--had been hired by the Republican National Committee.
Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.

The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states--and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in "conspiracy theory."

... more at link: http://baltimorechronicle.com/070505Miller-Irmus.shtml

Lets dig and find which states this surfaced and was written about - and how that compares to the targets of the USA purge. On the surface this felt like Projection (indeed another poster's post using that word spurred my little dig) but I wonder if these arrogant dirty tricksters are up to more than projection (go back to the election where our party paid millions to Sprague to tamper with registrations of Indies and Dems while pump up the number of Repub new registrations) - and given the moves to replace USAs with partisan hacks could be an even bigger political operation to rig elections that we can already see.

Anyone up for a little Googling and Digging? Which states were Sproul's activities documented in? How many of those states also were home to one of the dumped USAs?


Adding link to related thread where I first linked Oct 2004 news items about this: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=558608&mesg_id=565013 (because I am too lazy to rewrite those.)

[salin]

1. A detailed Salon article from Oct of 04: (includes using Kelly temps in WVa)

Sproul play
The RNC-funded firm Sproul & Associates stands accused of lying, cheating and even destroying Democratic voter registration forms to get more Republicans to the polls.

By Farhad Manjoo

October 21, 2004 | Lisa Bragg, a 37-year-old mother of two in St. Albans, W. Va., spotted a newspaper ad last August for a customer-service position offering the pretty good wage of $9 an hour. Bragg, who studied communications in college and talks with the easygoing flair of someone who "really just loves people," called the number and soon found herself in the offices of Kelly Services, the national temp agency, filling out an application. And then, like the other people who'd come in for the job, she discovered that there was something strange afoot.

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." At that point, some annoyed applicants walked off. 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," Bragg recalls. "They'd been sneaky all along, so when they said that, you could hear the sighs around the room." The applicants were then handed several documents describing what they would be doing -- and Bragg, a proud Democrat, saw that the entire enterprise was based on deception, and she decided to walk away.

The employment session that Bragg attended that summer afternoon in West Virginia was, it turns out, part of an apparent nationwide voter-registration scheme engineered by Sproul & Associates, an Arizona consulting firm that's been paid more than $600,000 by the Republican National Committee this year.

more: http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/10/21/sproul/index.html

[rasputin1952]

2. There was some minor news items at teh time, some relegated to

section 2, page 24 type of thing.

I do recall that some D registrations were found in a dumpster and two guys were aressted, but I don't know if they were tried, or a deal worked out somehow.

I always have Voter Registrations Forms in the car, or the bag I use for classes, I guess I've handed out a couple of hundred, I was surprised at how many hadn't registered, or were changing to D or I from R...:)

I never have asked a person to to place anything in the Party box, I don't think that is right, it is their decision, and I have always requested them to mail them in themselves, or take them to the Courthouse personally. I have helped some fill out the form, but after working at the Polls, I know that one must watch what they do, and how they do it.

In AZ, I was working the Polling place, and a pro-Reagan group showed up and set up banners inside the "clean" area, marked w/yellow tape by the way. I asked them to move outside of the "clean" area, and got an earful. I went in, called the Hot-Line for the State Patrol/Dept of Safety and w/in 2 minutes two patrol cars were there, they told them to leave, they didn't, they were arrested on the spot, all campaign materials were tossed in the trunks of the crusiers, and in a cloud of dust they were taken to jail, booked, and spent the night in jail...w/o voting...:)

The next week, it was in the paper that they had all plead guilty, and were fined $250 each, and got 100 hours of Community Service to boot. Even in a Red state, there is justice...:D

[salin]

3. or there was back before bushco came to town...

good for you per registering voters. I have talked long time "I don't vote on principle" folks into registering. Just a little help but I still want to believe that each vote counts.

[rasputin1952]

7. It can be some tough work at times, some people are just plain...

apathetic. They get a paycheck, a short vacation and a place to live....Americans are funny like that; they believe that simply because they are doing "OK", the rest of the country must be fine...Why vote?

My solution was to localize everything I could. Local issues, like a small increase in taxation or issues involved with streets and stuff that people see every day. Sure, the Big Guys are on the ballot, but so are initiatives that have an effect on locals as well as state issues. Once I get them to register, I don't give up either, I hang around City Hall and go to meetings whenever I can. While this city is relatively small, (24,500) it is still a hub in this area, and one can get a lot done just by asking questions that need to be asked. It doesn't hurt to despise the City Manager either...:evilgrin:
I don't let him get away with anything if I can bring it up at a meeting. His contract was up a couple of years ago, and there was all this talk about another city looking to hire him, (it was all BS started by his friends to make sure he got a new and better contract), and i stood up and said, "OK, let him go there, then we can get this city back on it's feet while he destroys another." I got a good laugh, but he got his contract renewed. I suddenly discovered that while I was driving for years w/my license plate lights burned out, it was suddenly a good reason to pull me over. This, and a couple of other minor pullovers showed me that this guy was ticked at me.

On a return trip from Grand Island, my boss an I passed him on a two lane highway in the company van, and he had a beer in his hand, two missing from the six-pack on the passenger seat, and he waved as we went by. I wanted to call the State Patrol, but didn't have my own cell, and I didn't want to use the boss' as he also worked for the FD at the time. With the company logo emblazoned on the van, and no other vehicles on the road, he would have been toast. However, I caught him at a function and told him what I had seen as far as the drinking while driving goes; he turned an interesting shade of pale white, kind of pasty...anyway, I haven't been pulled over by the cops since...:D

[Botany]

4. In Ohio Sproul did the following:

1) Had people who looked like America Coming Together aka ACT (I think this
was the group) doing voter registrations drives and tossing out the dem registrations.
These people had to vote provisionally and it is doubtful their vote was counted.

2) His last pay of about about 1.5 million was for his "help" in the Ohio recount.

Sproul went to the White House for an Xmas party in 2004.

[L. Coyote]

5. Simply Stated: They threw Dem registrations in the trash and not Repugs

This was the scam. Go out and get a bunch of people to register. Then, register the Repugs and throw the Dem registrations in the trash. Those people would think they were going to vote, then, discover, too late, that they were unregistered.

One of the hirees ratted Sproul out. It was all over the news. There was no prosecution, as I recall. That could be where the USA's come in. Who, in NV, OR, OH, AZ, and elsewhere should have been prosecuting this?

[salin]

6. add WV and PA

I have read reference to at least 8 states. Our combined list is six - wonder which other states. And I agree per the question - why no prosecutions. There were reported investigations in the news stories in NV - so what happened?