By Matea Gold, Joseph Tanfani and Melanie Mason
September 28, 2012, 10:57 a.m.

WASHINGTON — Florida
elections officials said Friday that at least 10 counties have
identified suspicious and possibly fraudulent voter registration forms
turned in by a firm working for the Republican Party of Florida, which has filed an election fraud complaint with the state Division of Elections against its one-time consultant.The
controversy in Florida -- which began with possibly fraudulent forms
that first cropped up in Palm Beach County -- has engulfed the
Republican National Committee, which admitted
Thursday that it urged state parties in seven swing states to hire the
firm, Strategic Allied Consulting.The RNC paid the company at least $3.1
million -- routed through the state parties of Florida, Nevada,
Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia -- to register voters and run
get-out-the-vote operations. Wisconsin and Ohio had not yet paid the
firm for get-out-the-vote operations it was contracted to do.The
RNC severed its ties to the firm Thursday after questions arose about
the work Strategic Allied did in Palm Beach County, where election
officials have turned over to prosecutors 106 voter registration forms
submitted by one worker, some of which contained apparent forgeries and
other problems.



Now elections officials
across Florida are scrutinizing voter registration forms turned in to
their counties on behalf of the state Republican Party. The state
elections division is also investigating.Florida GOP officials –
who said they hired Strategic Allied at the request of the RNC – alleged
in their complaint Thursday that the firm turned in forms with fake
signatures and false information, said Chris Cate, spokesman for the
Division of Elections, which will turn over its findings to the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement.Vicki Davis, president of the
Florida State Assn. of Supervisors of Elections, said Friday that she
had heard from elections officials in Lee, Bay, Clay, Santa Rosa,
Escambia and Okaloosa counties who had also identified problematic voter
registration forms turned in by the Florida GOP. Pasco County officials
discovered possibly fraudulent forms during the Republican primary,
Davis said.Cate, the spokesman for the state elections division,
said possibly fraudulent forms have also been reported in Miami-Dade and
Duval, two of the state’s most populous counties.The number of
suspicious voter registration applications was unusual, Davis said.
“There might be an occasional one, but I don’t think we’ve ever had this
number of counties that have had this number of cases all at the same
time,” she said.In Santa Rosa County, elections officials found
100 problematic voter registration applications out of a batch of
roughly 400 turned in by the state Republican Party.“Anyone with any sense would have known there was something wrong,” said elections supervisor Ann W. Bodenstein.

Most
were changes in current registrations filed in the names of real
voters, but signatures were spelled differently than the applicants’
names. Fake house numbers were given, and date of births did not match
the names. The biggest red flag was that most of the forms were missing
Social Security numbers.“It was that flagrant,” she said. “In no way did they look genuine.”

Bodenstein
said it appeared that whoever had been filling out the forms had been
working off a database of voters that was at least four years old. She
said she thought it was the work of “bottom of the totem pole” workers
who were trying to reach a certain quota in order to be paid. Bodenstein
reported the suspicious forms to the Office of the State Attorney for
the First Judicial Circuit of Florida, which sent out investigators
Thursday.Bodenstein stressed that elections officials would strive to protect every vote.

“We will not disenfranchise anybody,” she said.

But
if fraudulent forms changing the addresses of actual voters are
inadvertently processed, they could create obstacles at the polls. If
someone’s address is changed within the same county, they could still
cast a ballot once poll workers were able to establish that the voter
was in the correct precinct.“It’s another step the clerk, the poll worker and the voter would have to go through in order to cast a vote,” Davis said.

Things
would get more complicated if a voter’s address has been changed to
another county. If that were the case, the voter would be forced to cast
a provisional ballot, which would be evaluated later in the week by a
local canvassing board.More than 2,000 provisional ballots were
cast in Florida in 2008; less than half of those ballots were ultimately
counted, according to University of Florida election law professor
Daniel Smith.Strategic Allied is run by an Arizona-based man
named Nathan Sproul, who has been dogged by charges in the past that his
employees destroyed Democratic registrations. No charges were ever
filed.But his 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.Matea.gold@latimes.com
Joseph.tanfani@latimes.com
Melanie.mason@latimes.com
Twitter.com/mateagold






















Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times