Posted on 09/01/2006 4:31:58 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO
The secretary of state's office said Friday that it would investigate allegations that signature gatherers paid to sign up voters for the California Republican Party submitted registration forms containing fake names.
"If credible evidence of wrongdoing is found, we will work with local law enforcement to vigorously prosecute to the fullest extent of the law," Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said in a statement.
McPherson announced his investigation after the GOP said a routine screening of registration forms yielded some "questionable patterns."
"Together with the vendor, we figured out some kind of fraud was being perpetrated," said party spokesman Patrick Dorinson, referring to the party's principal, Southern California-based voter-registration firm, California Grassroots Mobilization.
The internal investigation found that several voter-registration workers from an unidentified Southern California subcontractor had created fake individuals in registration documents they submitted to party headquarters two weeks ago.
The subcontractor has since been fired, Dorinson said.
He would not say exactly how many signature gatherers were implicated, only that it was "more than a couple and less than 15."
The party submitted its findings to McPherson on Thursday.
The latest investigation comes six months after San Bernardino County prosecutors in March announced an investigation into more than 3,000 apparently fraudulent voter registration cards submitted to the state GOP.
In April, McPherson and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced a related inquiry into allegations of voter registration fraud in Riverside and Orange counties.
Riverside County officials said they received voter-registration cards with problems that included missing driver-license or state-identification numbers. In Orange and San Bernardino counties, residents complained they were improperly registered as Republicans.
Some of the cards from Orange and San Bernardino counties were collected by Tom Bader and Associates, an Orange County petition-gathering firm whose contract with the GOP has since been terminated, said Adam Aleman, executive director of the San Bernardino County Republican Party.
The firm's president, Tom Bader, said he supported the inquiry.
"If anybody should be shown to commit a fraud, (the investigation) is a good thing," he told The Associated Press.
The apparent fraud prompted the state GOP to suspend a so-called "bounty" program under which it had paid private contractors $3 for each person they registered as a Republican, Aleman said.
The investigations in Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties are continuing, officials say.
State Democrats have their own bounty program in which volunteers affiliated with party clubs or committees are paid $4 per registration form.
Democratic Party officials say that unlike the Republicans, their party has not been investigated for fraudulent forms, largely due to their policy not to work with private contractors.
"If you're going to use private vendors, you're going to run into these problems," said former state Sen. Art Torres, the California Democratic Party chairman.
--I can't think of anything to say that's printable--
Waiting for the outcome!
Are these people true idiots? or just pretending to be?
That's because Dems don't have to worry about insane "activists" purposely sabotaging the registration process working for the "progressives", but only as "subcontractors"...
You got it.
Fight fire with fire.
In other words, when we find something wrong, we seek to set our house in order.
Well I have to agree with the Demo on this one. Private contractors are the problem here.
Which, in turn, AP and the DNC immediately determine to be a crime.
Yes. People who are so desperate that they'll gather signatures or register voters for a living cannot be relied on. While a few are probably young idealistic folks who have the right motives and lack job experience, I would think that most people doing this work are either too stupid to make a real living, or they're borderline scum who have criminal records, drinking problems, etc. Any private contracting should be one-on-one with college students, avoiding sleazy middlemen and losers.
DemocRATS whining about voter fraud! ROTLFMAO! Now that's funny. I don't care who you are. That's funny right there. DemocRATS are the queens of voter fraud.
LMBO!!!
They keep all their fraud and corruption strictly in house, like the mob.
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