Voter registrations faked in GOP drive

[Judi Lynn]

Friday, 10/06/06

Voter registrations faked in GOP drive
About 150 forms questioned in Metro, Williamson County

By JESSICA FENDER,
BONNA de la CRUZ
and BRAD SCHRADE
Staff Writers

At least five apparently bogus voter registration forms were submitted to the Metro Nashville election commission by a worker with ties to the Republican National Committee, and up to 150 other registrations have been called into question, The Tennessean has learned.
(snip)

The five Metro forms contain the names, addresses and phone numbers of bona fide citizens, but the birth dates, Social Security numbers, signatures and some other details are wrong. Four of the citizens told The Tennessean that they did not submit the forms.

The five contain a signature with a surname of Morrison and a first name that is illegible but appears to begin with a "D." Metro staff said the registration forms bearing that signature were submitted in the name of Tennessee Victory 2006, a booster group advocating for GOP candidates in the state. A sixth form also apparently contains bogus information but does not bear a Morrison signature.

"I think it's pretty scary," said Jon Glassmeyer of east Nashville.

He discovered his name had been used when he received a new voter registration card in the mail though he's been registered for 20 years. He first noticed that the birth date was wrong and then that the Social Security number was off, too.
(snip/...)

http://www.gallatinnewsexaminer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061006/NEWS0206/610060429/1309/MTCN04

[wakeme2008]

1. EXCCCCCCCUUUSSSEEEEE me (and a Nom)

I hate these people

One of the latest comments to that story

Have you ever heard of the Motor Voter Bill? If not I encourage you to educate yourself and see where election fraud is coming from. Look and see which political party passed it. Let me give you a hint, it was the liberals and Clinton.

WTF does Repug Voter Fraud have to do with the Motor Voter Bill....

[Judi Lynn]

2. Yeah, I suspect the poster was full of horse feathers.

The comment from the poster who answered:

Not much of a story, really. They started manipulating election results in 2000 and perfected it in 2004. Yeah, yeah, I know there was fraud in the Ophelia Ford election but, the Republicans had such a good time with it that I can't help but say, "you shouldn't throw stones when you live in a glass house." I'll give it a few days before the GOP finds a way to blame it on Clinton, or liberals, or the media.

You only have to ask yourself who benefited from vote fraud in 2000, and there's a feeling it WASN'T "the liberals and Clinton."

(How could any one, even the slowest freeper, not realize Clinton was not running in 2000?)

Sad to know there are so manyj imbeciles around, still.

[ClintonTyree]

3. It's ALWAYS the Democrats and Clinton's fault.

Everthing.........no matter what they do, no matter how heinous their transgression, it's always the Democrats and Clinton that are at the bottom of it. The "Party of personal responsibility" they billed themselves as, and they haven't stopped passing the buck since they coined that phrase.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Kick!

:kick: :kick: :kick:

[MGKrebs]

5. How the hell did these get through the vetting process??

They must have serious problems in the Davidson County elections office.

They only found out about these because citizens called when they got new ID cards in the mail? This should be caught long before they mail the cards. The s.s. number was wrong, the birth dates were wrong; are they doing no records checking at all?

[Flirtus]

6. if you registered (R) you wouldn't lie,

now would you?

[LiberalFighter]

8. Something smells

It doesn't make sense.

They got SS numbers wrong. They got birthdates wrong. Elections office didn't catch it. But it voter registration cards were sent to the correct address?

What were the Republicans trying to do? Were these fake registrations for Democrats so that they could get them disqualified? Or were they getting paid by how many they got registered?

Elections office should had caught it. I would think they would check to see if they were already registered and if they were then do something else.


On the Social Security numbers... were the first 3 digits within this range? 408-415
Were they mostly within that range? Were they outside the range?
408-415 is designated for those that are a resident of the state at the time of application.

[Uncle Joe]

14. That's my guess, I believe they were being set up

to have their votes disqualified. This begs the question how many people whose registrations were tampered with by this Republican group have not picked up on this?

[lostnfound]

7. So that's how they will steal the Ford-Corker race

Won't take much, according to polls, it's only 1% apart.

[yellowcanine]

9. No surprise. Only ACTUAL cases of fraud nearly always turn out to be

Republican, versus the yelps of Republicans ALLEGING fraud by Democrats.

[Imagevision]

10. Here we go again, can't even have a straight/legit election

[Auggie]

11. What can be done about this? Anything?

[MagickMuffin]

12. Here's my suggestion

make the penalties harsher. The NH phone jammers only had to serve very short sentences, I think the longest was less than a year. I think tampering with our elections should face the same kind of sentencing as drug offenders.

[TexasLawyer]

13. my theory

maybe the people doing the registration were being paid a commission based upon the number of registration forms they turned in.

There would be an incentive to take random names from the phone book, fill in the address provided in the phone book, and make up any info that's not available.

Your employer would not catch on until long after you had been paid.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

28. I agree with your theory. But WHY would campaigh workers be given

incentives for such criminal behavior, which inevitably would be detected when false registrations were sent to real addresses?

See post #27.

[TornadoTN]

15. Get ready, Tennessee is a battleground

I wrote about it over in the Tennessee forum, but this state is shaping up to be the next Florida or Ohio. The race is too close and the GOP does not want to lose the seat under any circumstances. They are scared and rightfully so.

Get ready, Tennesseans.

[stepnw1f]

16. Fundies Have Been Helping in the Rigging of Elections

They are doing this type shit all over the country. How do I know, some might ask? Well, I was told by a fundie accidently.... the fuckers are dishonest trash that hide behind God and christianity to pull the shit they do.

[nealmhughes]

17. For those who don't know the area, Williamson is due south of Nashville/

Danielson and due north of Maury, two counties north of the Alabama state line... Franklin is in Williamson, and it is one of the wealthiest counties in the South, if not the entire country, growing tremendously rapidly...horse farms and farm farms rapidly becoming Whispering Quail Run on the Harpeth megamansion subdivisions. Country music stars love to live in Williamson....

My family helped settle the county...

[McCamy Taylor]

18. Financial fraud makes it ok for the GOP is the message.

[MGKrebs]

19. There needs to be some kind of audit up there.

Somebody needs to review their procedures, spot check the work, and observe the process during the election.

Let me amend that: Somebody OBJECTICE.

[NVMojo]

20. I've been helping register voters ...this shit would take some time &

creativity. What a bunch of desperate crooks.

[beltanefauve]

21. Whitewash and denial

"I think this is more financial fraud, not election fraud," Crisp said.

He said he heard about the 100 to 150 questionable forms earlier this week and did not believe a local GOP volunteer was behind it. Instead, he said, political groups contract with companies that pay people to register voters.

"At first blush it does not appear that the problem lies with somebody doing something trying to falsify a vote," Thompson said. "It's more an issue of registration problems. The question is, why would they do that?"

So why is it that whenever these things get uncovered, they always seem to favor Republicans???

:shrug:

[civildisoBDence]

22. Ann Coulter got caught red-handed, and look what happened

Nuttin.

The party in power has gerrymandered districts and used heavy handed tactics to consolidate power. They don't care about voter fraud now, but the moment they become the minority, they'll be whining like little girls.

Newsprism

[MGKrebs]

23. "State Election Coordinator Brook Thompson said...

the strategy behind the fraud was unclear, but that the system's safeguards appeared to have caught it."

WRONG. You found out about it because those citizens chose to come forward, according to the story. You even issued cards! The system's safeguards did NOT catch it...

"Brian Belt of Hermitage, a Tennessean copy editor, caught the error himself when a new card arrived in the mail for him bearing a wrong birth date.

The phony forms were submitted to the commission Sept. 6, and residents reported the fraud as early as two weeks ago."

If only there were some part of the justice system that wasn't controlled by the GOP.

[tomhayes]

24. 5 fakes is hardly an epidemic?

I'm a Dem. and i think the Republicans are corrupt and need to lose there absolute power of 2 (almost certainly 3) branches of government, but 5 fake registrations seems less like a plot by the Repugs and more like someone who is being paid per Republican registration.

If they can find who faked the registrations I think they should prosecute them to the FULL extent possible.

And they need to investigate this to make sure that voters are being set up to be disqualified from voting.

[droidamus2]

25. Democrats or Repubs

I didn't see anywhere in the article whether the registrations that were submitted were for Democrats or Republicans. i.e. Changing a Democrat registration to Republican. Does anybody know?

[MGKrebs]

26. I don't know, but if the election office is that inadequate,

almost anything can happen. There must be virtually no controls or oversight there for this to be able to happen. Under those circumstances, anybody with a little bit of access could affect a lot of votes.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

27. This may be all about marketing "Voter ID" to disfranchise millions in 2008

I believe Republican operatives may have deliberately given strong monetary incentives to low-wage contract workers to falsify a few dozen registrations, just so the forgeries would be discovered and just so media stories like this one would be published.

Why would Republicans do that?

Do you remember a NY Times editorial about "vote suppression" though the deceptive "Voter ID" bill (HR4844) that passed the House a few weeks ago? There's a great DU thread on this with lots of good links, archived at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2184544 .

The same people who got Dubya installed in the White House in 2001 through not counting votes in Florida have dreamed up a truly impressive scheme to replicate the 2000 election theft in every state, and in every election from 2008 onward. Jim Baker, the leader of the post-election Bush team in Florida in 2000, dreamed up "Voter ID" and pushed it into the 2005 "Carter-Baker Commission" report, with recommendations for legislation to prevent future election fiascos. But "Voter ID" would not prevent future Floridas; instead, it would ENSURE them.

The 2006 election provides the RNC its the last big oppportunity to gather examples of "voter fraud", so that at least ELEVEN MILLION voters (mainly Democrats) can be disfranchised in 2008 by a bill that will be re-introduced next year. We may be only one Senate vote and one House re-vote away from permanent minority status for the Democratic Party, starting two years from now.

Right now, "Voter ID" is a solution in search of a problem. Seeding the media with stories like this one tend to create the perception of a problem Republicans need to sell their ingenious plan.

IMO, Republican operatives in Tennessee and elsewhere may deliberately be providing low-wage contract campaign workers with incentives to falsify registrations, just so these kinds of news stories will be published, and they can use such reports as pretexts for stealing MILLIONS of votes, not just a few dozen, with "Voter ID" legislation.

If you were practically destitute and could get, say, $30 per card for falsifying as many voter registration cards as you wanted, what would you do?

No one has provided in court any evidence whatsoever that any person ever has been impersonated at the polls. But nonetheless, without any weighing of alleged benefits of "Voter ID" to its costs in disfranchisement, this ingenious scheme needs only a few dozen incidents like these to fool even experienced Democratic campaign workers into suppporting "Voter ID".

If "Voter ID" gets through the Senate (it has already passed the House as HR 4844), MILLIONS of voters WILL be disfranchised. (See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2841188&mesg_id=2841188 for the best available conservative estimate, ELEVEN MILLION). Who is not likely to carry picture ID at all times? Why, people without cars or jobs to drive to every day. And who are those people, and how do they tend to vote? In throwing out ste-level voter ID laws in Missouri and Georgia, courts found that hundreds of thousands of people without drivers' licenses would have been disfranchised in each of those states. So the RNC has decided to make "Voter ID" national election law.

IMO, it is highly unlikely anyone would try to swing an election with a few dozen impersonations of supposedly registered voters. As several other posters in this thread have noticed, this particular Tennessee scheme doesn't even make sense. The forgeries were BOUND to be caught. IMO, that must have been the motive for paying for them. If the objective were to influence elections, a much better plan would simply have been to set up voter registration tables in minority areas, have hundreds or thousands of previously registered people fill them out, and then simply throw them away after they'd all been collected and the campaign workers paid off. On election day, hundreds who wanted to vote Democratic would show up at the polls thinking they were registered. But in fact they would not be.

IMO, deliberately giving contract workers incentives to falsify registrations, to help make the case for "Voter ID", is the only explanation that makes sense here.

[SoCalDem]

29. This is why voter registration should be AUTOMATIC

just like when boys who turn 18 get a selective service notice..

EVERYONE who turns 18 should automatically be registered to vote. It would be up to them to vote, but they should all receive a voter ID card that has their birthdate, name & address, and IF they wanted to declare their party, they could call the registrar's office..

That would mean that EVERY 18 yr old EVERY year would BE a registered voter..

[LibDemAlways]

30. Repukes will pull any trick they can think up to

put someone into the "R" column. In Orange County, Ca there was a recent scam targeting Latino voters, who were asked to sign some sort of bogus petition - which was actually a voter registration form. Over the summer my college-student nephew had a job with the California Dem. Party which involved locating a bunch of these newly registered Latino "Republicans" and asking if they knew they had become registered Republicans. Most were upset that they had been scammed, and completed the form to change their party affiliation on the spot.