Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 01:01 pm
The Republican Party put on a big show of running away from the election fraud, scandal-ridden Sproul’s voter registration firm Friday, after potentially fraudulent voter registration forms were found in at least ten counties in Florida while at the same time a video of a Sproul employee illegally registering only Republicans supporting Mitt Romney went viral.
Sproul was paid to do voter registration and get out the vote work in Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia. Wisconsin and Ohio haven’t paid his firm yet for work done in those states, according to the LA Times. The Nation points out that “Although the payments were made by state party committees, its now clear that the Romney campaign and the national GOP coordinated the effort.”
It’s not just that they registered dead people, but they changed addresses for real voters, meaning that those folks might not be able to vote when they show up at the polls. It’s possible election fraud and voter suppression in one; quite the remedy for a party failing desperately in all polls.
Today, we find out that the Colorado Republican Party spent over $400,000 with Sproul for “voter contact”. Colorado GOP Chair Ryan Call told the Denver Post that he has fired Sproul’s company but can’t say for sure how much money they spent on him or how many voters he “registered” because invoices are still out.
Here’s the problem. It’s not as if the Republicans didn’t know that Sproul had a past of shredding Democratic registrations and shady, illegal tactics. In fact, they requested that he change his company name and operate under a shell in order to avoid the appearance of doing business with Sproul yet again.
The LA Times reported that the RNC requested Sproul set up a shell company in order to avoid being linked to his past, proving that they knew about it and still gave him the lucrative contract:
(H)is reputation is such that when Sproul was tapped by the RNC to do field work this year, officials requested that he set up a new firm to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations, Sproul told The Times. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.
In an interview Thursday, Sproul blamed the problematic forms in Palm Beach on one individual and said his firm had offered to assist elections officials in identifying the problems in other counties.
Obviously, Sproul was incorrect in his one bad apple claim. His firm is overrun with bad apples, across the country, suggesting that his employees are doing as they are instructed rather than going rogue. So the question is, since the GOP knew about Sproul’s tactics, what did they hire him for?
If they really hired him to do legal voter registration drives, why aren’t they demanding their money back? The Republican National Committee had a 2.9 million dollar contract with Sproul this election season.
If he really went rogue, wouldn’t good business people, as we are told the Republicans are, demand their money back? If they don’t, it can only be because Sproul wasn’t violating the stated or implied contract with his dirty deeds.
Democrats need to demand that the RNC come clean with their Sproul contract, and the DOJ needs to investigate just why a national party would hire a firm known for being accused of illegal tactics, and ask them to operate under a shell. Furthermore, when it came out that yes, he’s still committing election fraud, why aren’t they asking for their money back if he is not doing as they requested?
The RNC is trying to equate their for hire voter registration firm with ACORN, but the problems at ACORN came from employees making up forms in order to get paid. Those forms got rejected internally. That is not the same thing as changing real voters’ addresses. One is an act of greed and another is a deliberate attempt to suppress the vote.
Now we have a truly partisan voter registration firm being accused in multiple states of violating the law, and the Republican Party isn’t asking for their money back? What gives?
The Republican National Committee needs to put its money where its mouth is. If they really didn’t want or expect Sproul to do what he always does, they would be demanding that he give their money back; after all, it’s not as if they can afford to pay so much money for services not rendered per their contract. A truly fiscally conservative party would never let millions of their dollars go to waste and fraud.
Additional sources: U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General. “An Investigation into the Removal of Nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006, pp. 156-167, 190”
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