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There has emerged some potential voter fraud – possibly by a group hired by Republicans themselves, which puts me in mind of the verse in Matthew, in the Gospels, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" which essentially means, who are you, Mr. Pot, to call the kettle black?The controversy surrounds a Republican political consulting firm whose chief operated a voter registration project that was investigated by the
Justice Department and several state officials in 2004 on fraud allegations; charges were never filed, and in this 2012 instance, GOP officials, including the Republican National Committee, have been scrambling to fire the consulting firm to contain the political fallout a little over a month before the elections.
This new dip into the same political hot water concerns a new group headed by the same man whose group is facing
questions about suspicious voter registrations in swing states including
Florida and Colorado. The GOP was paying the firm a reported $2.9 million to register voters. Several states, including North
Carolina, are now
looking more closely at voter registrations submitted by the group’s workers.
In the swing state of Colorado, a
Fox News station reported on a young woman registering voters in Colorado Springs. In a
video, she said that ‘’We’re out here in support of Romney, actually,’’ and then, when she was asked who she works for, risibly claimed – after a long pause -- to be working for the county clerk’s office.
The consulting firm at issue, Strategic Allied Consulting – love those innocuous, meaningless-sounding names, don’t you? -- was formed under that name just this year, but it is headed by former Arizona state GOP executive director Nathan Sproul. He’s a veteran of about eight years of voter registration efforts paid for by GOP interests, efforts that have drawn scrutiny in several states,
North Carolina among them.
Interestingly, Sproul has put forth the same argument about voter registration drives that opponents of voter I.D. laws use: that if there’s any problem, it’s just with a few bad apples. There’s no fraudulent intent.
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