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Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Democracy in Iraq, disenfranchisement here
Posted by Jill | 7:08 AM

The Republicans aren't even trying to hide their plan to disenfranchise the opposition anymore. KLAS-TV in Las Vegas is reporting:

Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.

Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.

The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.


(via Kos)

Here's some info on Voters Outreach:

1) "Professional qualifications". Note the issues on which they've collected signatures. These are nearly all Republican pet issues:

National Voter Outreach History
National Voter Outreach, Inc. (NVO) is a political consulting firm specializing in organizing signature drives to qualify issues and candidates for the ballot throughout the United States. NVO was formed in 1988 through the merger of two petition management firms: Arnold & Associates, and Alpha & Omega and Company. The result is a strong company able to provide a greater range of services to its clients. The chief officers have over 60 years in combined experience. NVO incorporated in the State of Nevada in May of 1992.

The principals have worked on over 300 separate, successful signature drives in Forty-two states and D.C., organizing the collection of more than thirty-six million signatures. This includes campaigns at all levels from small local issues, requiring a few hundred signatures, to state constitutional amendments requiring up to one million raw signatures.

NVO has conducted successful signature campaigns in the following states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming and Washington D.C.

Principals of National Voter Outreach have been at the forefront of all the major direct democracy campaigns that have swept the country in the past 15 years including: Tax Limits, Term Limits, Environmental protection, School Choice, Class size, Gaming, Property Tax Reform, Tort Reform, Labor Issues, and Medical Reform.


2) "Company philosophy". This is pretty revealing as well, and LOADED with right-wing code:

We believe that the process of Direct Democracy offers one of the greatest safeguards to our Republican form of government. At the same time it helps to secure the values and freedoms upon which this country was founded.

Our system of representative government is in serious trouble. In recent years it has failed to provide basic services with reasonable cost and efficiency: Failed to secure us in our homes and on our streets. Failed to provide an environment conducive to economic prosperity: Failed to guarantee our individual liberties and the collective good.

We believe that one of the keys to regaining control of our destiny individually and collectively is to strengthen and expand direct democracy. Our goal is to provide more opportunities for the electorate to make decisions on important issues directly, through the initiative and referendum process.

The Lord fulfill all thy petitions. Psalm 20:5




CEO Rick Arnold also publishes Direct Democracy Journal (same URL as his signature collection business). This publication is touted by the Public Interest Institute, which "promotes the importance of a free-enterprise economic system and limited government in society based upon individual freedom and liberty."

Sounds pretty libertarian, doesn't it? That being the case, I wonder why they're selling their souls to George W. Bush? Unless part of the contract they signed with the GOP was to only collect registrations from Republicans....

So go ahead, Republicans. Justify destroying all voter registrations by Democrats, but none by Republicans.

UPDATE: Bob Johnson at Kos has more information:

Searching for information on the voter registration fraud stories breaking tonight in Nevada and Oregon, I kept coming across the same name: Nathan Sproul of Sproul & Associates in Phoenix, Arizona.

Nathan Sproul is the former head of the Arizona Republican Party and of the Arizona Christian Coalition (ah, the irony... a Christian).

Sproul is connected with the Republican National Committee-funded voter registration organization, Voter Outreach, Inc., a group that used paid registrars to register voters in a number of states including Nevada, Oregon, Arizona and perhaps more, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maine and Missouri. (Others states pending, particularly swing states.) Sproul's organization also recruited registrars by fraudulently telling recruits that they would be working for America Votes, a legitimate nonpartisan GOTV operation


Would Jesus disenfranchise Democrats?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Adam Mordecai lists just how widespread Republican voter registration fraud and suppression efforts are.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: There are reports that the Oregon Secretary of State has held a press conference indicating that he has sworn affidavits from people stating that they were told to throw away Democratic voter registrations. More to come.

In other Republican voter fraud news, the Republican Secretary of State in Minnesota, Mary Kiffmeyer, is being accused of shorting voter registration cards as a means of suppressing new registrations.

And Buzzflash has a screencap of a Google search for "Voter Outreach of America" which found a job posting for "Door to door signups" in Nevada. Note that the ad is paid for by the RNC.

This is BIG, folks...because it's starting to look like an organized effort on the part of the RNC to disenfranchise new voters who state their intention to vote Democratic. So far it's in Nevada and Oregon, and it may be in Minnesota as well. The blogosphere is all over this story, but so far the mainstream press is mum. I don't know enough about RICO statutes to know if it applies here, but this can't be legal. Kos has the unhappy recap so far. It's spreading like a cancer -- Nevada, Oregon, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. And to make matters worse, the preposterously political Jefferson Airplane Volunteers album is starting to not sound so dated anymore.

AND YET ANOTHER UPDATE: They've been in Ohio too.



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