Formaldehyde
Both Fair And Balanced
Firm hired by Florida GOP knew weeks ago of possibly fraudulent voter registrations
TALLAHASSEE — Nathan Sproul was hardly unknown when his firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, was hired over the summer to register voters for the Republican Party.
In 2004, employees with his previous firms were accused of a wide assortment of infractions: destroying voter registration forms of Democrats, duping college students into registering as Republicans, refusing to register Democrats or independents. Nevada, Oregon and Arizona opened investigations but closed them without charging anyone.
On Tuesday, new details emerged that Strategic Allied Consulting knew of problems in Florida weeks ago in what is now a case of possible voter registration fraud in a dozen counties.
Top Democrats are saying the GOP should have known better.
"I have grave concerns not just about the Republican National Committee's decision to retain this company, but also about what the company has allegedly done," said U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland in a statement to the Times/Herald. "Contrary to a 'zero-tolerance' policy, it appears that the RNC knew exactly what it was doing when it hired this company as the only one it uses to conduct this kind of work across the country."
Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is asking that Sproul make himself available for an Oct. 12 interview and provide copies of correspondence with state and national Republicans. Sproul's firm was the only vendor hired by the RNC to register voters in seven battleground states and was paid $3 million.
Sproul, 40, and his associates say Democrats are bound to criticize his work, which he says has signed up 500,000 voters since 2004. But Republicans aren't standing by him, either. The state Republican parties in Florida, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia fired the firm Sept. 25, and the Republican Party of Florida filed an election fraud complaint last week that is now part of a criminal investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Up until this summer, RPOF ran an in-house voter registration program that used paid staff to collect voter registrations. The RNC goal was a national voter registration effort targeting key states like Florida. The RNC already had an arrangement with Strategic Allied Consulting, so the state party says it followed the national party's lead.
Company representatives have said they kept Florida Republicans informed once they were alerted of questionable registration forms in Palm Beach County and fired the employee responsible on Sept. 18.
Republicans say they didn't hear about the flawed forms until a week later when told about them by a Palm Beach Post reporter.
But Cheryl Johnson, Lee County's voter registration director, told the Times/Herald on Tuesday that she noticed some odd applications that came quite a bit earlier, on Aug. 28. It looked like someone had checked Republican in a number of party registration boxes in a manner that didn't match the way the rest of the application was filled out. Four of the forms appeared to have been filled out by the same person.
Johnson called the person who dropped them off, a Strategic Allied Consulting employee named Danielle Alvarez. On Sept. 6 — 12 days before they learned about the Palm Beach forms — Johnson met with Alvarez and a man named Jack Reed.
"They said they were shocked," Johnson said. "They told me that they fired someone and it wouldn't happen again."
Johnson said they took copies of the questionable forms and promised they would call back. But that was the last Johnson heard from them.
Fred Petti, an attorney for Strategic Allied Consulting, failed to mention the Lee County problem to the Times/Herald last week as the news broke.
During a phone interview Friday, as he explained that one employee was responsible for the flawed registration forms in Palm Beach, he said he didn't know about reports of other flagged forms in other counties.
"This is the only person we've fired for this," Petti said, referring to the Palm Beach employee. "The only thing we've seen are the forms in Palm Beach."
When asked about Lee County on Tuesday, however, Petti apologized. "I'm sorry," Petti said. "I was running around like crazy that day. If I said something that was inaccurate, I didn't do it intentionally. I was so focused on Palm Beach County. I wasn't purposely trying to mislead you."
It's unknown how extensive the registration form problem is in Florida. David Leibowitz, spokesman for Strategic Allied Consulting, said many thousands more filed by the firm are legitimate. The FDLE is reviewing the forms for possible criminal misconduct.
But it poses a crisis for Sproul, a Tempe, Ariz., native who also owns Lincoln Strategy Group, which received about $70,000 from Romney for President Inc.
After graduating in 1994 from the Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Minnesota, Sproul went to Washington as an intern for then-U.S. Rep. Jon Kyl of Arizona. Later he became director of the Christian Coalition Arizona branch, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. In 2002, he started his own consulting firm, Sproul & Associates.
During the 2004 election, when the RNC paid him $7.9 million, Sproul gained national attention. In Oregon, a TV news reporter interviewed a canvasser working for one of Sproul's firms who said he threw away Democratic registrations. In Nevada, a disgruntled employee told CBS News and other outlets that his supervisor ripped up and threw Democratic registrations into the garbage. In Pennsylvania, students at several colleges complained that they were tricked into signing petitions for causes like the legalization of medicinal marijuana, low insurance rates and stricter rape laws, only to be pressured to register as Republicans or their signatures would be deemed invalid.
Students at the University of South Florida in 2004 complained about a similar ruse, but that registration drive was linked to a different firm, which was also working with Republicans.
Officials with Strategic Allied Consulting point out that Sproul was never charged. Leibowitz said he expects a similar outcome this time around as well.
"There were a couple thousand contractors doing this across Florida," he said. "There were bound to be some problems. I agree, the allegations keep coming up. But essentially, the findings are groundless."
In GOP voter registration fraud case, echoes of ACORN, but differences, too
TALLAHASSEE — As criminal investigators sift through hundreds of questionable voter registration forms filed by the Republican Party of Florida, it's hard not to see parallels with a case four years ago that made election fraud the campaign issue it is today.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — ACORN — became conservative shorthand for systemic voter fraud and threatened to undermine confidence in elections throughout the nation. Sen. John McCain said as much during his final debate with Barack Obama in 2008, declaring that ACORN was "destroying the fabric of democracy."
The offense — filling out hundreds of fraudulent voter registration forms — is strikingly similar to what a vendor hired by Republicans is accused of in what is now a criminal investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
But in the only statewide ACORN investigation that led to arrests, the group blew the whistle on itself.
In June 2008, ACORN's Florida organizer alerted Miami-Dade County law enforcement that 1,400 registration forms that hadn't been turned in appeared to be problematic. Of that total, 888 were found to be fraudulent, in some cases registering the likes of actor Paul Newman and singer James Taylor.
"To their credit, they brought the forms to us," said Joseph Centorino, who successfully prosecuted that case against 11 ACORN workers in Miami-Dade County. "They turned over a whole box of forms that they thought had been done fraudulently. As far as I know, these forms were never filed at the elections offices."
That level of cooperation hasn't been exhibited by Strategic Allied Consulting, the vendor hired by the Republican Party of Florida in July. No company official alerted state elections workers about problematic forms until they were already detected by elections workers. On Sept. 17, an elections worker in Palm Beach County flagged questionable forms after spotting obvious irregularities.
It wasn't until that discovery was reported by the Palm Beach Post on Sept. 25 that state Republicans say they knew about problems with forms the firm was filing on behalf of the party. After firing the company last week, the state GOP filed an election fraud complaint against the vendor.
But in late August, an elections worker in Lee County found problematic forms filed by Strategic Allied Consulting. Although company officials on Sept. 10 fired the employee who filled out the 11 forms, they left officials hanging about what to do after their only meeting.
"I never heard back," said Cheryl Johnson, Lee County's voter registration director.
A spokesman for Strategic Allied Consulting, David Leibowitz, said an attorney for the firm called Johnson this week to apologize for the lack of follow-up. Fred Petti also apologized to the Times/Herald for saying last week that he knew of only one employee — the Palm Beach County worker — who was fired.
The FDLE announced Wednesday that it has launched a criminal investigation into the forms filed on behalf of the state GOP. Submitting false voter registration information is a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in jail and a fine of up to $5,000.
Questionable registration forms have been found in a dozen counties spanning from South Florida to the Panhandle. Many of the forms were incomplete, at least one was registered to a dead person and some in Palm Beach County included addresses for voters that were business locations, such as a gas station — a pattern that echoes ACORN problems from 2008.
Strategic Allied Consulting officials say that with 2,000 contractors registering voters in Florida, there are bound to be some bad apples.
That defense was also used by ACORN, which disbanded in 2010 six months after video footage emerged showing some of its workers giving tax tips to conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute. Founded in 1970, ACORN was an advocate for left-leaning causes such as fighting predatory lending and utilities but was not affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Its successes made it a target for conservatives. During the 2008 election, ACORN claimed it signed up 1.3 million voters, but it was later revealed that 30 percent were rejected for a variety of reasons. Its voter registration efforts led to several legal battles that chipped away at the organization's reputation.
In Washington state, prosecutors got ACORN to pay a $25,000 fine for costs of an investigation that led to felony charges against seven people for submitting phony applications for celebrities like actress Katie Holmes and New York Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera. The prosecutor concluded it was no grand conspiracy, just a case of workers cheating ACORN to get paid for work they didn't do. ACORN workers in Nevada filed forms for bogus applicants, such as the Dallas Cowboys football team, which led to a $5,000 fine.
Reports of ACORN problems were widespread in Florida. Orange County officials said they got a form that registered "Mickey Mouse" to vote. ACORN officials told the Times in 2008 that the form didn't come from them. Linda Tanko, who oversaw the voter registration forms in Orange County, remembers that ACORN's applications were in disarray.
"We found lots and lots of the forms having street issues, their addresses weren't matching the valid range of house numbers on a street," Tanko said. "One person had a dozen or so applications. There were some that were grossly incomplete."
Tanko couldn't recall, however, if anyone was found guilty of fraudulent registration. In Broward County, 8 percent of ACORN's 16,000 voter registration forms couldn't be verified, but elections officials there didn't suspect fraud.
The FDLE hasn't investigated a fraud case involving ACORN that led to any arrests. The agency did assist in the Miami-Dade case prosecuted by Centorino. His investigation led to 11 ACORN workers charged for falsifying information on hundreds of forms, with penalties ranging from probation to 125 days in jail.
"It strikes me as a very similar scenario as to what's happening now," Centorino said. "These people are getting paid minimal salaries and don't necessarily come with a background where you can trust they will do what they're supposed to do. Their motivation was to get paid for work they didn't want to do. But they were low level. Was this a bigger conspiracy? We didn't find that."
In the case of ACORN, it was found to be a number of employees who forged voter registration forms so they could get paid for them. And it was ACORN who told the authorities about the problems in many of the cases.
In the case of Sproul, it was intentional and quite widespread. Plus the RNC itself hired them in an exclusive contract to try to deliberately sway the votes in key states.
So who is the real ACORN? Those who filed bogus returns where non-existent people would have never voted anyway? Or those who intentionally tried to defraud the voting system?
