Reader Anna Kipnis passes along this Las Vegas TV station story about possible election fraud:
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. . . .
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. . . .
Voter registration drives have often been a partisan activity, since the parties have a strong incentive to register voters who they think will be sympathic; and there’s nothing wrong in parties targeting places that they think are likely to be frequented by party sympathizers. But obviously it’s quite bad — and I suspect seriously criminal — to purport to register someone but then throw out their forms, making them think that they’re now officially registered when they really aren’t.
UPDATE: Reader Brett Bellmore passes along another story about similar fraud:
The U.S. Justice Department and state police are investigating widespread allegations of criminal vote fraud in Florida, days before the state closes registration for the presidential election. . . .
A field director for one of the many national partisan organizations trying to drum up votes in Florida admits to routine efforts to rig the outcome. They include submitting thousands of invalid voter registration cards, as well as failing to turn in boxes of cards filled out to register Republicans.
“There was a lot of fraud committed,” said Mac Stuart, former Miami-Dade field director for ACORN. Among his allegations — that ACORN “quality control” workers routinely kicked back Republican voter registrations while paying for Democratic ones. “They said they had enough,” he said. . . .
Stuart is listed as a plaintiff in a notice of intent to sue ACORN and others in a discrimination class-action lawsuit. . . .
Stuart said ACORN officials at state headquarters in Tampa were aware of what was going on, and discouraged him from talking about it. He said he was ultimately fired as “a loose cannon.”
While Republican registrations were ignored, Stuart said those of convicted felons were eagerly sought, even though by law they are ineligible until they are granted clemency by the state. . . .
The article also mentions another alleged fraud:
In Leon County, elections supervisor Ion Sancho said he found nearly 1,000 apparently fraudulent party-change forms. All were to re-register African American Democrats at Florida A&M University as Republican. . . .
FURTHER UPDATE (Feb. 8, 2006): It seems that the charges in the update were in fact not true. According to the St. Petersburg Times (Dec. 15, 2005),
Fourteen months after a campaign to increase Florida’s minimum wage drew allegations of voter fraud, a federal judge in South Florida has ruled at least some of those accusations against grass roots political group ACORN were so baseless they amount to defamation.
U.S. District Judge James King has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Mac Stuart, a former ACORN employee, saying Stuart never provided evidence to support his claim that he was fired because he uncovered voter fraud. . . .
The judge upheld ACORN’s counterclaim that Stuart’s lack of evidence made his allegations libel and slander. The group has always claimed it fired Stuart for insubordination. . . .
An investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement also found no evidence of criminal activity at ACORN, department officials confirmed Wednesday. . . .
I’m sorry to have inadvertently passed along the erroneous accusations, but glad to be able to report this latest development.
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