Sproul Knew About Voter Registration Fraud for Weeks Before Getting Busted

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Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:31 am

Strategic Allied Consulting’s alleged voter registration fraud problems began back in August, according to Lee County’s voter Registration Director.

When Cheryl Johnson received some voter registration forms that looked suspicious, she called the person who submitted the forms. According to the Tampa Bay Times: “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, Danielle Alvarez, a now former employee of Strategic Allied Consulting. She met with Alvarez and a man by the name of Jack Reed sometime between September 6 and September 12. You may recall the first we heard of the irregularities in Palm Beach County on September 26^th. This matters when you consider what happened next.

The Tampa Bay Times/Herald reports the company’s attorney; Fred Petti didn’t mention the problem in Lee County when he spoke with the publication last week. He claimed that he didn’t know about 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.”

Sure, Mr. Petti, we believe you. Just like we believe that Strategic Allied Consulting has never tolerated even the teensiest violation of Election law. Just like we believe the Republican Party is so concerned about election integrity that it hired Nathan Sproul given his history and asked him create a new company, so that no one would know he was the same guy whose company was behind Republican voter registration irregularities in 2004.

Besides, as Strategic Allied Consulting’s spokesman David Leibowitz points out, the company filed thousands of legitimate registration forms. So then, we should just forget about the increasing number of irregularities, now spanning to 12 counties in Florida alone. No one is buying it.

Even if we didn’t believe it before, it gets increasingly difficult to believe that the Republican Party hired Sproul, as Congressman Elijah Cummings put it:

“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.

We already know the RNC wanted Sproul to set up yet another shell company to disguise his history which looks a lot like his present. The RNC ordered State parties to hire Strategic Allied Consulting and we know it was the only company hired in five battleground states, as Sarah Jones pointed out previously.

Moreover, the Voter Registration irregularities are not restricted to Florida. There’s that little incident in Colorado, Hraf Haraldsson told us about on Friday.

When it happens once, it’s an isolated incident. When it happens a few times in a limited area, then there’s room to suggest there might be a quality control problem. When it happens in several states, it’s a pattern of behavior. When the company engaged in that pattern of behavior is hired again under a new identity, it was hired to repeat that pattern of behavior.

Image from radiomankc