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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">abby rappaport Am Prospect<b> voter suppression</b> kpfa</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-----</font></p><div style=""><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/kanye-wests-independent-campaign-was-secretly-run-by-gop-elites" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Kanye West’s 'Independent' Campaign Was Secretly Run by GOP Elites (thedailybeast.com)</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">new documents show Kanye West’s doomed White House campaign—styled as an “independent” third-party effort—appears to have disguised potentially millions of dollars in services it received from a secretive network of Republican Party operatives, including advisers to the GOP elite and a managing partner at one of the top conservative political firms in the country.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Potentially even more alarming? The Kanye 2020 campaign committee did not even report paying some of these advisers, and used an odd abbreviation for another—moves which campaign finance experts say appear designed to mask the association between known GOP operatives and the campaign, and could constitute a violation of federal laws.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>At the heart of Kanye’s political operation was Holtzman Vogel, </b>one of the most powerful and well-connected law firms serving major Republican political and nonprofit organizations today. And weaved throughout his campaign, whether the multi-platinum rapper realized it or not, were Republican operatives who may have been less interested in seeing a President West than in re-electing President Donald Trump.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Election-Meddling Henchwoman Didn’t Work for Kanye: Aide</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">DON’T KNOW HER]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Paul S. Ryan, vice president of government watchdog Common Cause, called the revelations “a big deal.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The importance of disclosure in this matter can’t be overstated,” Ryan told The Daily Beast. “It’s no secret that Kanye West’s candidacy would have a spoiler effect, siphoning votes from Democrat Joe Biden. Voters had a right to know that a high-powered Republican lawyer was providing legal services to Kanye—and federal law requires disclosure of such legal work.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Federal disclosures also show the campaign enlisted legal services from an array of firms with links to Trump and the Republican Party—including leading voter fraud conspiracy theorists and more than a half-dozen legal practices which went on to push baseless election fraud lawsuits on behalf of Trump or the GOP.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">In fact, Holtzman Vogel played key roles in those efforts. </span>They represented Trump in a Pennsylvania lawsuit in late September, while advising the West presidential campaign—advice which at one point included Pennsylvania ballot strategy. The firm is also tied to the Honest Elections Project, which has been involved with voter-suppression efforts.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The former “Birthday Party” contender’s campaign even paid roughly $60,000 to one of those firms—Minnesota-based Mohrman Kaardal—in early December, when it filed a baseless election fraud lawsuit. The suit was ultimately rejected with such vigor that it nearly cost the attorneys their license to practice. That outfit worked with another election challenging group, the Amistad Project, a function of <b>Thomas More Society,</b> which employed Trump attorney and Rudy Giuliani protégée<b> Jenna Ellis.</b> Kanye 2020 retained the firm within days of the Amistad Project’s August launch.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It’s very clear that the whole point behind Kanye’s campaign was to try to re-elect Donald Trump.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">— Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The nature of these hidden connections is obviously complex. And experts say that appears to be the point. Any effort to untangle them will, unfortunately, reflect that. But they say that the red flags—including efforts to cloud disclosures, and Republican operatives exploiting a spoiler candidate—appear to be there.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Daily Beast shared the court filings and FEC data with a number of government watchdog groups, who all concluded that the campaign and operatives appear to have for one reason or another shielded their connections. The groups found this troubling, and noted that without the documentation in the lawsuit—a breach-of-contract claim which a former campaign vendor filed this spring in Texas state court—the lack of transparency would have kept some of the connections secret.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reviewed hundreds of campaign communications in court records, as well as Kanye 2020’s FEC filings. Communications director Jordan Libowitz concluded that the campaign bookkeeping was a “disaster,” despite the expert guidance from Holtzman Vogel, and the documents are “enough to raise an eyebrow and a red flag or two.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“This was absolutely amateur hour. And his campaign paid a lot of money for those results,</span>” Libowitz said. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">[PATTERN?]</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He continued, “It’s very clear that the whole point behind Kanye’s campaign was to try to re-elect Donald Trump. Whether that was a goal of Kanye is another issue. But he was clearly seen as a way to steal potential votes from Biden.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">1051906886</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kanye West hugs President Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval office in 2018.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Multiple people connected to the campaign, including some of the campaign’s contracted lawyers, had a similar assessment. Some said that messaging decisions had to first go through secretive political “hands.” Others indicated that their involvement had been solicited by known Republican political operatives, though when pressed they all declined to name names. All of them also acknowledged an <b>apparently close relationship between West and top Trump aide Jared Kushner, who held meetings with West at his Wyoming ranch just ahead of his campaign announcement,</b> drawing speculation that the campaigns were coordinating.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One campaign lawyer, Arizona-based attorney Tim La Sota—who has filed election challenges—told The Daily Beast that while West “seemed to be a sincere candidate,” political operatives understand that an “unrealistic prospect of winning doesn’t mean you can’t influence things.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I can tell you that he did not seek me out. Somebody else did,” La Sota said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">While it’s unclear just how West, ostensibly running as an independent, managed to connect almost exclusively with Republican firms—many of which had direct connections to Trump himself—his efforts were quite clearly in the hands of experienced conservatives.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Kanye West Is Still Team Trump: ‘I Still Got a Red Hat On’</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">UNCENSORED</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Marlow Stern]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>There is one major exception, however. The progressive firm Millennial Strategies was one of Kanye’s largest 2020 vendors, and it’s unclear if that was a ploy to give Kanye’s campaign the air of true independence, or just a true exception.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Otherwise, Kanye’s campaign seems to have been loaded with Republican operatives.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">At, or at least near, the top of the campaign’s chain was sitting GOP Virginia state senator and veteran political operative Jill Vogel—managing partner at Holtzman Vogel, a heavyweight in the world of conservative politics and dark money groups.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Vogel’s campaign work is made clear in months of email and text communications revealed in a multimillion-dollar breach-of-contract lawsuit targeting the West campaign and consultants, first filed this spring in Texas state court and reviewed by The Daily Beast.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The suit, brought by former campaign subvendor SeedX, alleges the company never got paid for months of campaign work</b>, including building and maintaining the website and merch sales, which are counted for campaign purposes as donations. SeedX backs up those allegations with hundreds of pages of communications with campaign officials and contractors, indicating it engaged in several months of campaign work.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">SeedX alleges that because the campaign did not pay them, their work would qualify as either a loan or an in-kind contribution—which would have exceeded limits. However, the campaign failed to acknowledge either in their filings.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“You’re not just going to trip and find your way into these Republican circles.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">— Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The case got kicked up to federal court in the Western District of Texas, where a judge dismissed it on Nov. 30, citing lack of jurisdiction—in other words, SeedX filed the lawsuit in the wrong place. The court did not take up the merits of the cas</b>e, which was closed before it reached the discovery stage, when subpoenas could be issued. A person with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast that the plaintiffs remain confident, and a new lawsuit will likely be filed again soon.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The documents also happen to show that Vogel advised the campaign regarding legal and compliance matters starting as far back as August 2020. The issues ranged from website language and disclaimers to fundraising advice and ballot access rules.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“She is a name that comes up a lot when you’re looking at right-wing money operations in general, tied to a lot of major players,” Libowitz explained. “She and her firm [Holtzman Vogel] have ties to people like [top conservative fundraiser] Leonard Leo, just really big Republican mone</span>y.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Libowitz said Vogel may have wanted to keep her name off of filings to minimize “any embarrassment that may come with being publicly affiliated with the trainwreck that was the Kanye campaign,” but added that “it’s also likely that she did not want people to know that a Republican operative was behind his campaign.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Two people involved with the campaign identified Vogel, whose husband is D.C. lobbyist Alex Vogel, as a key player. </b>One person told The Daily Beast that Jill Vogel was “basically behind it all,” and had been a presence in the campaign since at least last July, when right-leaning lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs was advising the campaign. A third source confirmed her involvement but was unsure of her exact role.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">1051894744</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kanye West speaks during a meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval office in Oct. 2018.]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Michael McKeon, a partner at Mercury, confirmed to The Daily Beast that he had worked with Kanye 2020 in its early stages</b>. His role, he said, was to “connect the campaign with various people, groups.” Asked in a follow-up if he had connected the campaign with Vogel, McKeon referred the question to the campaign and ended the conversation.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">An email sent to the campaign’s listed email contact bounced back.<b> West’s publicist, Pierre Rougier,</b> did not reply to a detailed request for comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But watchdogs strongly doubted that Kanye’s campaign just happened to end up with this many GOP operatives on its team.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“You’re not just going to trip and find your way into these Republican circles,” Libowitz observed. “BakerHostetler works for the Republican National Committee,” he said, referencing a New York firm which Kanye 2020 paid $152,000 a full month after he lost the election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“So many of these firms work for major Republican organizations, and they are not doing this for him out of the kindness of their hearts,” he added. It appears that well over a dozen Kanye 2020 firms have deep connections in national and state Republican politics, and that many of them pushed false claims of a fraudulent or fatally flawed election. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“It’s pretty clear Kanye was a GOP plant, whether he knew it or not.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Ye Defends Dave Chappelle: ‘You Can’t Cancel None of Us’</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">HUH?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Marlow Stern]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Despite the evidence of Vogel’s campaign work in the court records, none of Kanye 2020’s FEC filings show any payments to her or her firm. (Neither Mercury nor McKeon appear, either.) However, Vogel associates herself directly with the campaign in multiple emails found in the court filings, and other campaign vendors identify her several in texts and emails as the “campaign lawyer.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In one late January email obtained by The Daily Beast, Vogel identifies herself to SeedX as “the attorney for the Kanye West 2020 presidential campaign.” (Emails show she had been in touch with SeedX in this capacity for months.) She then says she has been “authorized” to offer SeedX $20,000 to buy the campaign website, and hints that the vendor—who did months of work but apparently never got paid—could face possible civil litigation if they do not set aside their demands.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>SeedX rejected the $20,000 and sued for $2 million, arguing it matched the rates of other vendors.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Attorneys are allowed to volunteer compliance services to campaigns. However, federal law requires campaigns to report what the cost of that work would be. They must also report the name of the person who performed the work.<b> Court exhibits show Vogel used her official firm email account while advising on Kanye 2020.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Libowitz said it is unclear why Vogel, an expert who advised Kanye 2020 on the many nuances of FEC laws—at one point consulting another firm partner, whom she identifies as<b> a former FEC commissioner</b>—decided that she herself did not need to appear in the filings. The matter, he said, raises questions.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“If an outside group was paying for them, that needs to be disclosed as an in-kind contribution, and if that’s the case you would immediately run up against limits,” Libowitz said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the<b> Campaign Legal Center,</b> who reviewed the court and FEC records, also questioned the rationale.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Voters have a right to know where political money is coming from and where it is going. But the Kanye 2020 campaign’s FEC reports didn’t give much insight into who was actually working for the candidate,” Fischer said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“There are several red flags here that warrant FEC scrutiny.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">— Paul S. Ryan, vice president of government watchdog Common Cause</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He noted that while the FEC doesn’t always require campaigns to separately disclose payments to subcontractors, the “subvendor loophole can’t explain all of the giant holes in the Kanye campaign’s FEC reports.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Ryan, of Common Cause, noted that “if Holtzman Vogel’s legal services extended beyond compliance with federal campaign finance law to other matters, then the value of those services would constitute a potentially-illegal contribution to Kanye’s campaign.</b>”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">To that point, one of Vogel’s emails includes a lengthy discussion of ballot requirements in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, which would not appear on its face to be related in any way to FEC compliance.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“There are several red flags here that warrant FEC scrutiny,” Ryan said.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Interestingly enough, some Vogel money did flow the other way: Her teenage son appears to have donated $180 to Kanye 2020 in October, FEC records show, likely in exchange for any of a number of combinations of Yeezy election swag.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Vogel did not reply to several specific questions about her involvement with the campaign.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Another key operative attached to West’s White House bid, whose involvement had attracted media attention last year, was </span><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">Nathan Sproul. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of Sproul’s firms was at the center of a voter fraud case in 2012, and another, Lincoln Strategy Group</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, has since 2008 pulled in more than $10 million in federal political consulting services, according to FEC records—including $600,000 from the Trump campaign weeks ahead of the 2016 election.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Like Vogel, Lincoln Strategy was not reported to have received any money from Kanye 2020. However, one of its principals, longtime GOP political consultant Dan Centinello—who appears regularly on Kanye 2020 text and email chains—contributed $260 to the campaign in October.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[She Went From Repping Kanye to Hyping a QAnon Fan and Trump</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">FEVER DREAMS</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Adam Rawnsley, </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Asawin Suebsaeng]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Centinello and Sproul are just two among a number of Lincoln Strategy employees who advised West’s campaign, using official Lincoln Strategy Group email addresses, according to emails and text messages found in court exhibits.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And while Lincoln Strategy did not get paid by Kanye 2020, the campaign did pour about $4.8 million into a firm called “Fortified Consulting.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>At this point, you may not be stunned to learn that “Fortified Consulting” has almost no public footprint. However, it shares an Arizona address with Lincoln Strategy Group, and has been identified in multiple news reports as belonging to Sproul.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">No other political committee has ever paid Fortified Consulting.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Over the four months that the firm was raking in its $4.8 million from the “independent” West, its apparent alter ego, <b>Lincoln Strategy Group, </b>was working openly with mainstream Republican clients—including<b> Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), and the Republican Party of Texas</b>. Those clients paid Lincoln a combined $1.1 million over that period.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>At one point, Lincoln Strategy employees even discuss buying out West’s campaign merch store after the election—which would be prohibited by law. (The store had problems of its own.)</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But legal filings show Sproul, who did not respond to requests for comment, was merely a small visible sprout off the campaign’s far deeper and unseen Republican roots.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Kanye West’s Presidential Hopes Turn to Dust</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ELECTORAL COLLEGE DROPOUT</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tarpley Hitt]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Beginning in August 2020, and stretching through September of this year, Kanye 2020 made nine payments totalling $692,057.35 for “compliance” and “accounting” to a Texas entity called “GSF Inc.” That eye-popping figure came after the hip-hop mogul had lost any hope of attaining the nation’s highest office and, for context, it exceeds what former Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) splashed out for compliance services during his entire failed bid for re-election.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But business records show that no such company as “GSF Inc.” exists in the Lone Star State, and the FEC database shows no other political committee has ever hired a firm by that name.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>However, the database does show that an array of right-wing candidates and committees have paid a company sharing the same address in the suburbs just north of Austin: Grand Slam Finance</b>, Inc. And the Texas lawsuit documents Grand Slam Finance’s extensive involvement in the Kanye 2020 campaign—as well as illustrates how the firm appears to have both facilitated and potentially concealed connections between West’s campaign and the Republican operative network more broadly.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Texas records show that Grand Slam Finance was originally the creation of accountant Russell Anderson, who handled the books for disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom Delay’s political action committee.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But Anderson told The Daily Beast that he sold his stake in Grand Slam Finance to his partner Deanna Hayes “three or four years” ago.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Texas suit includes among its exhibits emails the plaintiff exchanged with Hayes—identified as an “associate” of Vogel and her firm—as well as correspondence between Hayes and campaign treasurer Andre Bodiford regarding banking information.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I was hoping we could keep andre out of it but apparently Deanna [Hayes] doesn’t have everything,” Centinello wrote in one message.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[629490050</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kanye West and then-President-elect Donald Trump speak with the press after their meetings at Trump Tower on Dec. 13, 2016.]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It is unclear why Centinello, a self-professed veteran of major multimillion-dollar campaigns, wanted to leave the West campaign’s treasurer out of the loop here.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Notably, the West campaign’s nine payments to GSF add up to about $250,000 more than the firm’s combined federal compliance income over the last decade.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ryan called it “strange” to see a consultant “suddenly banking way more than it previously has for services, all from one campaign.” And Ryan and Libowitz both made note of West’s status as an “amateur candidate,” and a billionaire who largely funded his own campaign.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Hayes did not reply to requests for comment. However, days after The Daily Beast first contacted her, she sent an apparently errant text, with a reference to a “Jill”—likely Vogel.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“This reporter has been calling and texting. I haven’t answered or responded nor will I. No idea how he got my name or what he wants but now he’s calling my husband. I let Jill know yesterday just so she’s aware,” the text message read. Neither Hayes nor Vogel replied to questions about this text message.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Public records indicate Hayes’ history with Vogel run through another pair of leading GOP apparatchiks.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lobbying documents in Hawaii show Hayes and Grand Slam working for the Crosby Ottenhoff Group. This firm belongs to former RNC Chief Finance Officer Caleb Crosby and Benjamin Ottenhoff, the treasurer for the GOP’s digital fundraising juggernaut WinRed.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Kim K: I Regret Telling Kanye to Take His MAGA Hat Off</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">SEEING RED]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Neither Crosby nor Ottenhoff responded to questions about whether they had also worked for the West campaign.<b> Crosby has a particularly close relationship with Hayes and with Holtzman Vogel</b>: Hayes incorporated his personal firm, CFC Consulting, which also works for marquee Republican names, and handled the books at a conservative nonprofit where Crosby worked as treasurer.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Grand Slam Finance also formerly managed compliance at another institution where Crosby served as fiduciary: Karl Rove’s Super PAC American Crossroads.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The law firm for American Crossroads? Holtzman Vogel PLLC,</span> according to FEC records.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The same is true for the Senate Leadership Fund, a Mitch McConnell-boosting PAC, which also lists Crosby as its treasurer. In fact, the Senate Leadership Fund is only one of several entities based out of Holtzman Vogel’s Virginia law office which feature Crosby as an officer. SEDITION CAUCUS]</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Holtzman Vogel and the Crosby Ottenhoff Group have teamed up numerous times in the past few years, most recently for a pair of GOP PACs in Virginia.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">West’s self-described “spiritual adviser,” music manager John Boyd—who the campaign paid $25,000 for “political strategy consulting—was adamant that nobody, Republican or Democrat, ever manipulated the hip-hop star. However, he admitted that his campaign was highly disorganized and the candidate was never in full control of his own operations.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“He had companies, individuals working for him, I don’t even know if he knew what they were doing that deeply. That’s my personal view,” Boyd told The Daily Beast. “There were definitely agendas out there that perhaps he didn’t have full control over.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Boyd declined to give names or provide further details.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Colorado-based attorney Mario Nicolais, who had scrutinized the West campaign’s ballot petition activity in Wisconsin last August, told The Daily Beast that the GOP’s targeting West—who, according to his then-wife Kim Kardashian, had been contending with mental health struggles—was “about as bottom-of-the-barrel moral turpitude as you can be, in my opinion. Just sleazy, low-rent cashing in.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Nicolais added that it was “important to follow up on these stories,” even a year later, because they could “invite bigger problems in the future, similar tactics only on a larger scale.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It turns out that this was not even a conspiracy theory,” he said. “It was literally documented.”</div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ggl 7 22</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>Kanye West's 'Independent' Campaign Was Secretly Run by ...https://www.thedailybeast.com › kanye-wests-independ...</div><div>Dec 17, 2021 — The campaign took steps, experts say, to mask its connections to GOP operatives. That could violate federal election laws.</div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font>

<a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/28/gops_acorn_moment/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.salon.com/2012/09/28/gops_acorn_moment/</font></a>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For this, the group was killed. Tea Party groups organized rallies, local authorities squeezed the group, and Congress even introduced and passed a bill in 2009 called the “<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/17/congress-votes-strip-acorn-federal-funding/">Defund ACORN Act</a>.” The group, which suffered from other significant legal and financial issues, is now defunct. But in that time, ACORN became a top-tier villain of the right, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/search/index?qstring=ACORN&from=1%2F1%2F2008&to=12%2F31%2F2009">mentioned</a> hundreds of times in 2008 and 2009 by conservative media figures tracked by Media Matters. In later 2009, the pollster PPP asked respondents, “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” Among Republicans, <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/poll-gop-base-thinks-obama-didnt-actually-win-2008-election----acorn-stole-it.php">only 27 percent said Obama actually won</a> the race — 52 percent said that ACORN stole it. Even some GOP congressional candidates <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/doug-hoffman-acorn-has-stolen-ny-23-election.php">blamed their losses</a> on ACORN....</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nathan sproul, asked to rename co by gop

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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">firm fired, working in 6 states incl colo <a href="http://bigdanblogger.blogspot.com/2012/10/coordinated-nationwide-gop-voter.html">http://bigdanblogger.blogspot.com/2012/10/coordinated-nationwide-gop-voter.html</a>

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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier this week, 40,000 members of the Daily Kos community sent an email to the Virginia State Board of Elections (VSBOE) demanding an investigation into a <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://kos.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=SsICek8NtDjZ06DLKe5IWHFYrzBidpxn">voter registration supervisor</a> employed by<b> Pinpoint,</b> a subsidiary of Strategic Allied Consulting, after he was arrested and charged with 13 counts of voter registration fraud.

 </font>

<div class="byline news-politics"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even">The Brad Blog</span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/brad-friedman">Brad Friedman</a> <span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></em></font></div>

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GOP Voter Registration Scandal Widens, Prosecutors File Criminal Charges</font></h1>

</div>

<div class="story-date"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-10-20T18:06:00-07:00">October 20, 2012</span></span></span></span></em>  |  </font></div>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/colin_small_virginia_gop_voter_registration_fraud.php">from TPM’s Ryan Reilly</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span>. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586">the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span>, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for <a href="http://kelly.house.gov/">Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa.,</a> <span class="print-footnote">[4]</span> in the U.S. House of Representatives.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-voter-registration-gop-arrest-20121018,0,5352175.story">Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times is reporting</a> <span class="print-footnote">[5]</span> that Small was “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He was first hired, says Tanfani, by Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm owned by the disgraced GOP operative and paid Mitt Romney political consultant Nathan Sproul. Even before this year’s registration fraud scandal, which began with Strategic in Florida, Sproul’s companies have long been accused of, though never charged with, destroying Democratic voter registrations in election after election and state after state, going back to at least 2004. Despite that, Sproul was hired by the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004, by the McCain/Palin Campaign in 2008, and by Romney during the Republican Primary cycle.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul’s company, Strategic Allied Consulting, was hired by the RNC in August for more than $3 million, reportedly as its sole voter registration company this cycle. His company was said to have been <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592">fired by the RNC</a> <span class="print-footnote">[6]</span> and five different battleground state Republican parties several weeks ago, after fraudulent voter registrations began to emerge across Florida. Some of those questionable applications included address changes for existing voters, such that <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9590">Florida election officials told the BRAD BLOG</a> <span class="print-footnote">[7]</span>they worry voters could find themselves disenfranchised come Election Day. In Florida, as in many states, provisional ballots cast at precincts other than where voters are officially registered will <em>not</em> be counted. So changing the addresses on voter registrations without voters’ knowledge is a serious crime with potentially very serious consequences.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reilly’s report at TPM says that Small “worked for PinPoint, a company hired to register voters on behalf of the Republican Party of Virginia.” In fact, PinPoint Staffing placed ads to hire workers for Strategic Allied Consulting in FL, VA and a number of other states, though t<a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">he BRAD BLOG</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span> has learned that the company removed many of those ads once the scandal began to break in Florida. They have since modified some of their newer ads to hide their ties to the Republican Party.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In response to queries we sent to Sproul late Thursday, his crisis spokesperson, David Leibowitz, attempted to distance his client from the arrest of the Republican Party worker in Virginia, claiming that “the only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was PinPoint Staffing, in fact, which reportedly hired the man Strategic blamed for the fraudulent registration forms turned in originally in Palm Beach. But while PinPoint continues to seek workers for GOP-related efforts around the country, and as Sproul’s operations continue in “as many as 30 states”, it is the Republican National Committee’s response to the entire affair, including to the arrest today, that may be the most troubling…</font>

<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The RNC ‘firing’ deception</font></strong>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b13369e2017c32a0a23a970b-pi"> </a><span class="print-footnote">[9]</span>Colin Small, according to his LinkedIn profile, as <a href="http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b13369e2017c32a0a23a970b-pi">captured by the NotLarrySaboto blog</a> <span class="print-footnote">[9]</span> (which was the first to highlight the <a href="http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/doh/2012/10/virginia-gop-caught-destroying-voter-registration-forms.html">initial report</a> <span class="print-footnote">[10]</span> of a man with PA license plates tossing a bag of Virginia Voter Registration Forms into a Harrisonburg dumpster), wasn’t only working for the state GOP or for Strategic Allied Consulting or for PinPoint. He was working as a “Grassroots Field Director at the Republican National Committee,” according to LinkedIn.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[<em>Update: <a href="http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/19/14556980-gop-registration-worker-charged-with-voter-fraud?lite">NBC News is reporting</a> <span class="print-footnote">[11]</span> this morning that RNC Communications Director denies Small was "directly employed by the RNC" and that he will be "told to take down that."  Small is currently in jail and unable to respond to clear up the question, however.</em>]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last month, several days after fraudulent voter registration forms collected by Strategic Allied Consulting and turned in by the Florida GOP began to be discovered by County election officials in Florida, the <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592">RNC claimed to have fired Strategic</a> <span class="print-footnote">[6]</span>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sean Spicer, the RNC’s Communications Director, boasted that the party took “swift and bold action” after learning of the fraud, claiming they have “zero tolerance” for it or for those who commit it. However, as we summarized in <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586">our very first report on this scandal</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span>, Sproul’s companies have a long history of workers being paid per Republican registration form and for being accused of destroying Democratic ones.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite that, they were hired once again this year by the RNC who, Sproul says, asked them to create the new company in June without his name on it to avoid it being tied to him. Not very bold or zero tolerancy of them. Though Spicer said he had no knowledge of that arrangement, Sproul told <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">the BRAD BLOG</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span> he stands by his assertion.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beyond that, last Thursday <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627">we reported</a> <span class="print-footnote">[12]</span> that Sproul’s firms, including what appeared to be a “clone” operation of Strategic Allied Consulting, calling itself Issue Advocacy Partners, were still found working for Republicans and right-wing ballot initiatives in at least 10 states. Subsequently, on Friday, the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fired-rnc-consultant-canvassing-campaign-20121012,0,2171682.story"><em>Los Angeles Times </em>reported</a> <span class="print-footnote">[13]</span> that, in fact, Sproul was still “hiring workers for a voter canvassing operation this fall in as many as 30 states.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Thursday, following Small’s arrest, Sproul’s spokesman Leibowitz hedged that number by telling us via email: “What we said on the record to various media outlets is that his companies are working in ‘as many as 30 states.’ That could mean 1 state. Or 2. Or 30. You get the idea, I’m sure.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We do. The idea is Sproul does not want to come clean about his ongoing operations and who it is that he continues to work for, preferring instead to live up to the “shady” adjective that’s often applied to him in the media. Despite our follow-up request, Leibowitz did not identify the exact number of states that Sproul was still working in, or who was paying him to do so.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strategic was said to have been hired by state Republican Parties, at the request of the RNC, for voter registration drives in five states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado) and for “Get Out the Vote” campaigns in Ohio and Wisconsin. When both RNC and state GOP officials claimed to have fired them, it seems they didn’t really mean it.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Tanfani’s report at <em>LA Times</em> late Thursday, Spicer confirms that, really, it may have only been Sproul who the party claimed to be “boldly” cutting ties with. The operations Sproul created for the Party beginning in August, the ones that led to fraudulent voter registrations in Florida and destroyed applications reported in Colorado and Nevada as well, are still in place.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“After Sproul was dumped,” Tanfani reports, “the registration operation that he assembled continued working under the supervision of party officials, Spicer said. He said the workers will continue to do get-out-the-vote work until the election.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The firing of Sproul and Strategic Allied Consulting was a deception.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moreover, as <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9632">The BRAD BLOG detailed on Tuesday</a> <span class="print-footnote">[14]</span> the company’s mailing address, according to <a href="http://bradblog.com/Docs/ElectionsFraudComplaint_StrategicAlliedConsulting_092712.pdf">documents released [PDF]</a> <span class="print-footnote">[15]</span> by the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement upon announcement of <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9609">their statewide criminal investigation of Strategic</a> <span class="print-footnote">[16]</span> (the firm is also being <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9622">criminally investigated in CO</a> <span class="print-footnote">[17]</span>), was registered as a corporation last June out of the same law office run by top-level Republican National Committee election attorneys where both Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super-PAC and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity are also based.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite Spicer’s attempt to downplay the VA incident on Thursday — “He made a mistake and he’s being charged with it, which we fully support” — as he similarly did for the FL incidents previously, it’s become clear that the RNC’s deceptive and often illegal registration and canvass operations are toxic, widespread, and very high-reaching.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ironically, or perhaps not at this point, Romney, who hired Sproul late last year as a “political consultant” for some $71,000, appears to have <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9397">committed both voter registration fraud <em>and</em> voter fraud himself</a> <span class="print-footnote">[18]</span> in Massachusetts, when he voted in the January 2010 U.S. Senate Special Election between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. While he owned houses in both California and New Hampshire at the time, he did not own a Massachusetts home until July of that year. Instead, he used the basement of his son’s Belmont, Mass., home as his own registration address in apparent contravention of Massachusetts state residency laws. [<em>See our still-growing list of other <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9467">very high-profile GOPers recently involved in apparent election fraud crimes</a> <span class="print-footnote">[19]</span>.</em>]</font>

<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trashed registration forms in Virginia</font></strong>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to FEC filings obtained <a href="http://wtvr.com/2012/09/27/virginia-republicans-fire-voter-registration-group/">by CBS 6 in Richmond</a> <span class="print-footnote">[20]</span> last month, the Virginia Republican Party reportedly paid some $500,000 to Strategic for registration work before the state GOP claimed to have fired them, several days after the fraudulent forms collected by Strategic and submitted to county Supervisors of Elections by the Florida GOP began to surface in the Sunshine State. As we now know, only Sproul was fired. The voter registration operation itself continued.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Small, the man arrested on Thursday and charged with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors after allegedly having been found to have tossed at least eight registration forms into a dumpster in Harrisonburg, Va. (Rockingham County), was reportedly working for an operation named PinPoint on behalf of the Virginia GOP, according to Reilly at TPM.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/virginia_sheriff_republican_voter_registration.php?ref=fpb">earlier report on the matter at TPM</a> <span class="print-footnote">[21]</span>, before Small’s arrest later in the day, Reilly noted that “Virginia does not register voters by political party, so it would be difficult for someone to discard forms from their political opponents.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not really.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reilly’s assessment does not take into account the very specific and purposely deceptive process used by Sproul’s companies — and, as suggested by evidence we’ve collected, perhaps other Republican-based voter registration outfits across the country — to identify and register <em>only</em> Republicans to vote, while attempting to filter out Democratic-leaning voters.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an investigative report earlier this month, <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600">the BRAD BLOG detailed</a> <span class="print-footnote">[22]</span> video-taped and other evidence from nearly half a dozen states, demonstrating a deceptive, national Republican voter registration strategy where voter registration workers purposely misrepresented themselves as pollster to potential registrants.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Essentially, as detailed in video clips and other testimony in that report, the GOP voter registration workers hired by Sproul were trained to pretend to be taking a poll and to ask voters if they supported Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. If the answer was “Obama”, the potential registrant was thanked and sent on their way. If the answer came back as “Romney”, they were given the opportunity to register to vote. In that way, the thousands of workers employed by Sproul, the former head of the Arizona Republican Party and Christian Coalition, kept many Democratic-leaning voters from registering to vote at all.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In one <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9583">YouTube video that went viral last month</a> <span class="print-footnote">[23]</span>, a young Colorado registration worker — who, it turned out, had been working for Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting on behalf of the state GOP — is seen doing exactly that. Another video<a href="http://www.ktnv.com/news/local/166966656.html">posted by Las Vegas ABC affiliate Action News 13</a> <span class="print-footnote">[24]</span>, shows a worker there playing out the same pollster scheme in Nevada. Sproul shared an email with <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span>in which he had boasted to other company officials that the Vegas video tape captured their worker carrying out her training “perfectly”.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Virginia, where the Pennsylvania man working for the state GOP was arrested Thursday, Chesterfield County’s General Registrar Larry Haake was seen <a href="http://wtvr.com/2012/09/27/virginia-republicans-fire-voter-registration-group/">explaining to Richmond’s CBS 6</a> <span class="print-footnote">[20]</span> in late September that he had received complaints of Strategic employees discovered doing the same thing in a library last month.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They were responsible for people that appeared in some libraries in Chesterfield County, supposedly to conduct voter registration drives,” Haake said, “but they were asking voters for whom they are going to vote.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Haake says he informed the GOP of the incident at the time, but, apparently, no action was taken.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it’s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.</font>

<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ‘PinPoint’ piece of the puzzle</font></strong>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In that <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600">same story on the Sproul/RNC voter registration deception</a> <span class="print-footnote">[22]</span>, we cited a <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600">9/28/12 report by the <em>Los Angeles Times</em></a> <span class="print-footnote">[22]</span> that tied PinPoint Staffing to Sproul.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The article quoted William T. Hazard, the Strategic employee said by the company to have turned in the original fraudulent registration applications in Palm Beach County, Fla. He says he “did nothing wrong”, but told the paper that he was trained “to approach people and ask whom they supported in the presidential election. When people answered with President Obama, he said, he wished them a good day. If someone said Mitt Romney, he asked if they were registered to vote. If not, he handed them forms to fill out.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He says that it was a help wanted ad placed by PinPoint that led him to the work for Strategic, Sproul, and the Republican Party.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He got the voter registration job after responding to a Craigslist ad placed by a company called PinPoint Staffing seeking people to do ‘voter surveys’,” the <em>Times </em>reported at the time. “The ad specified that all applicants had to be registered Republicans and active voters.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Further, the paper says, “Although he reported to a PinPoint Staffing office in West Palm Beach, he said, ‘I thought I was dealing with the Republican Party.’”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PinPoint was key to Sproul’s operations. So who are they?</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over our three-week long investigation of Sproul and the GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, we had collected dozens of help wanted ads posted by PinPoint Staffing that were nearly identical to others published on behalf of Strategic. Some of those ads placed in North Carolina had proved instrumental, originally, to the<a href="http://www.bluenc.com/republican-paid-voter-registration-operation-linked-fraud">BlueNC blog’s Greg Flynn</a> <span class="print-footnote">[25]</span> in late August when they were key to his uncovering Sproul’s previously-secret ownership of Strategic Allied Consulting.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of the PinPoint ads on Craigslist and other sites — seeking “VOTER REGISTRATION SUPPORT” by “REPUBLICAN PARTY SUPPORTER(S)”, for example — were hastily removed from the Internet at nearly the same time that Sproul and Strategic were being outed and supposedly fired. <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span>captured many of them before they were taken down, some with the message: “This posting has been flagged for removal.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We discovered ads by PinPoint Staffing in dozens of cities, in Virginia, North Carolina and Washington D.C., as well as all across Florida, from Pensacola in the panhandle, down to Palm Beach County where the <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586">first fraudulent registration forms were discovered</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span> in late September.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More recently, PinPoint ads for “Political Jobs” or “Campaign” or “Canvassing” operations began to no longer include references to “Republican Voters” or “Romney” or the “Republican Party”. Instead they might read “ARE YOU LOOKING FOR YOUR BIG BREAK INTO POLITICS?”. Such ads have been found this month in Virginia, Wisconsin, New York, Arizona and Florida.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During our research on our report last week detailing the <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627">state’s where Sproul was confirmed to still be working</a> <span class="print-footnote">[12]</span>, we found evidence of his continuing operations under the names Issue Advocacy Partners and Grassroots Outreach in Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York, New Jersey and, possibly, Ohio (where the RNC had previously admitted that Strategic had been scheduled to do “Get Out the Vote” work this year before the “firing”.)</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At TPM, Reilly reports that “A man who answered the phone at Pinpoint and only gave his name as Ryan said he was not allowed to comment. ‘I really want to stay out of it,’ he said.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ads for Strategic placed in late Summer by PinPoint in Alachua, Fla., and in September in Winston Salem, N.C., told perspective employees to “Contact Ryan.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The phone number given on the ads was from Phoenix, AZ. Sproul’s main operation is based just outside of Phoenix, in Tempe.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Let me be as unequivocal as possible. Nathan Sproul and his businesses have no ownership interest in Pinpoint,” his spokesperson Leibowitz, hired by Sproul to manage the crisis several weeks into it, insisted to <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span> late Thursday. “He doesn’t control it, nor is he affiliated with it.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When we followed up to ask if Sproul had used PinPoint to hire workers in FL, VA or anywhere else, whether any of his current companies are still using them, and for what services he has used them in the past, or if he has since stopped, Leibowitz demurred.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Given that Nathan’s companies have no connection to the Pinpoint-related story you cited earlier, we see no need to go into any further detail.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">- <em><a href="http://litbrit.blogspot.com/">Deborah Newell Tornello</a> <span class="print-footnote">[26]</span> contributed research to this report.</em></font>

<em><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CORRECTIONS: We’ve updated the piece above to reflect new information made available since publication early this morning. Included in the updates: TPM corrected its <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/colin_small_virginia_gop_voter_registration_fraud.php?ref=fpnewsfeed">report from last night</a> <span class="print-footnote">[27]</span> to say that “The Rockingham County Sheriff office originally said Small was 31 years old. The agency later corrected that information to say he is 23″; Small was charged with 8 felony counts and 5 misdemeanors, not 13 felonies as we’d initially described.</font></em>

<em><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9643">THE BRAD BLOG</a> <span class="print-footnote">[28]</span></font></em>

</div>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==

 </font>

<span class="postHeader"><span class="toLocalTime" data-tlt-epoch-time="1350053100"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Friday, Oct 12, 2012 2:45 PM UTC</font></span></span></p>

<h1 id="entry-title-single" class="entry-title headline lg"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Operative linked to voter registration fraud still working for GOP?</font></h1>

<h2 class="deck"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Fired" consultant Nathan Sproul appears to be operating on behalf of Republicans in at least 10 states</font></h2>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Questions continue to grow about Nathan Sproul and his various companies’ multimillion dollar work for the Republican National Committee, despite claims that they’ve broken ties with him on the heels of a nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal. A virtual clone of his discredited Strategic Allied Consulting firm appears to still be operating on behalf of Republicans in at least 10 states.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the same time, Democrats in Congress are now asking for official answers from both Sproul and very senior Republicans, according to new letters obtained by <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul went on the record with us, briefly, to address some of these issues in his own defense, before he was ordered by his newly hired crisis response manager to stop speaking to us all together.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the <b>RNC invested $3 million to hire Strategic Allied Consulting, a company quietly created this August by Sproul, a paid political consultant to Mitt Romney, and then instructed state GOP affiliates in seven key battleground states (FL, NC, VA, NV, CO, WI and OH) to do the same, they knew very well about his companies’ long documented history of alleged electoral misconduct and voter registration fraud.</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The longtime GOP operative’s voter registration and “Get Out the Vote” firms have been accused, during election after election, of <b>destroying and altering Democratic voter registration forms, </b>though no formal charges have ever been filed against him, despite repeated urging from high-ranking members of Congress and others. Sproul’s long track record of improprieties was bad enough that before they would give him the contract as their national voter registration group this year, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-voter-fraud-allegations-20120928,0,4284007.story">according to Sproul himself</a>, the<b> RNC “asked us to do it with a different company name.”</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Subsequently, Strategic Allied Consulting is alleged to have collected fraudulent voter registration forms. Some of those forms had the addresses of existing Democratic voters changed so that some of Florida’s county election officials <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9590">now worry that voters could be disenfranchised</a> when they go to the polls this November and find they’re no longer registered at their old precinct, or even in the same county. The fraudulent forms were collected by Strategic and submitted by the Florida GOP (which paid Sproul’s firm some $1.3 million for voter registration work, their largest single expenditure in the 2012 cycle) in at least 12 different FL counties.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the RNC then publicly claimed to have <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592"><em>“fired”</em> Sproul’s new company</a>, <em>after</em> the fraudulent forms came to light, it’s likely that the RNC also knew full well that many of their state GOP affiliate organizations were <em>still</em> quietly employing Sproul’s firms for partisan work in a number of other states.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RNC spokesman Sean Spicer <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-voter-registration-20120929,0,2318037,full.story">played dumb</a> about having asked Sproul to create the firm without his name on it — “To my knowledge, no one requested that” — though Sproul told <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> during an on the record conversation, eventually aborted by his recently hired <a href="http://leibowitzsolo.com/why-choose-leibowitz-solo">crisis manager David Liebowitz</a>, that he stands by his assertion.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I’m not going to comment on this further,” Sproul told us when we’d asked for specifics, since the RNC appeared to be calling him a liar, “but I’m not retracting my prior comments either.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps even more disturbing is the evidence suggesting that his companies are <em>still</em>operating in states around the country under different names. That, despite the RNC’s claims to have “severed our relationship” with Sproul, and the assertion that they “acted swiftly and boldly” to cut ties with the group only after the allegedly fraudulent registration forms came to light in Florida (and as Democratic registration forms were also alleged to have been destroyed by Strategic workers in other states, such as <b>Colorado and Nevada</b>.)</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When we asked Sproul directly: “Do your other companies still work for the RNC or other state or local parties?” his response came back as a blunt, “No.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a response to a follow-up query, when we asked Sproul to explain evidence suggesting that his companies were, in fact, still operating elsewhere on behalf of Republicans, he walked back his original denial a bit.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I know you have additional questions, including many about SAC [Strategic Allied Consulting] and its affiliates and work we’ve done in other places and for other clients,” Sproul said. “Those questions fall either outside the bounds of what I can discuss or outside the bounds of where I’m comfortable going in this story. I hope you’ll understand.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And yet, as still more evidence is emerging to show that Sproul may have been less than forthcoming in some of his responses to <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> (he has refused to respond to additional, specific follow-up queries on this emerging evidence after Liebowitz was brought on board as his crisis spokesperson), Congressional Democrats have similar questions about Sproul’s work with the GOP and if it may be continuing even now.]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Senior Democratic members of the U.S. House Elections, Judiciary and Oversight Committees seeking answers — from Sproul, <b><span style=" background-color: #FFF200;">RNC Chair Reince Priebus, as well as GOP heavies Karl Rove and former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie (now a senior adviser to Romney) who founded one of the top Republican Super PACs and paid Sproul some $750,000 for unspecified work </span></b>— about what Sproul’s operations may still be up to, despite the RNC’s recent public, if unsupported, claim of a “zero tolerance” policy for election fraud and those who practice it …</font>

<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul companies still at work for the GOP in other states?</font></strong>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shortly after the <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586">GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal first broke</a> late last month,<a id="1030435&session=2011&view=expenditures" href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/170198/gop-quietly-hires-firm-tied-voter-fraud-scandal-work-battleground-states%3ELee%20Fang%20at%20The%20Nation%20detailed%3C/a%3E%20records%20at%20the%20CA%20Sec.%20of%20State%27s%20database%20disclosing%20some%20%3Ca%20href=">$430,000 in payments from the California Republican Party</a> made to “Grassroots Outreach, LLC,” a firm which shared the same corporate Tempe, AZ, address as Sproul’s companies Sproul & Associates and <b>Lincoln Strategy</b> Groups.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most of the payments in this election cycle, according to the database, are said to be for “Signature Gathering” (presumably for ballot initiatives, etc.), though $34,000 of those payments are noted to be for “Voter Registration.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul confirmed to <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> that Grassroots Outreach is, indeed, one of his companies, though he insists the CA database is in error, because, he says, his companies have done no voter registration in the state this year.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Those entries are incorrect,” he told us. “We did not do any voter registration work for the [California Republican Party] in 2012 as indicated. I think its a simple mistake in reporting. I think that should have been for signature gathering as well.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He also denied doing registration work in Oregon this year, despite evidence we detailed in <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600">our recent report</a> showing that registration workers in Portland were seen using the same, deceptive tactics caught on video tape in other parts of the country where <b>Sproul’s workers were seen presenting themselves as pollsters, rather than registration workers, in order to screen for Romney supporters and filter out Democratic-leaning voters, so as to keep them from being able to register to vote at all.</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greg Flynn of the North Carolina blog “BlueNC,” was the one to <a href="http://www.bluenc.com/republican-paid-voter-registration-operation-linked-fraud">originally connect the Strategic Allied Consulting firm to Nathan Sproul</a>, after noticing that Sproul & Associates was listed at the owner of <a href="http://strategicalliedconsulting/">Strategic’s Internet domain name</a>. (After his initial report, the company changed the InterNIC record of the domain to “private,” but not before Flynn had screen-captured the evidence.)</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Flynn tripped across that information while looking into help wanted ads placed on Craigslist and elsewhere in North Carolina, seeking Republicans who were “self-motivated people to contact voters for the election … interesting in helping Mitt Romney win North Carolina … working with Voter Registration Projects and … looking for team members to help expand Republican voter registration,” etc.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, Flynn has uncovered <a href="http://bluenc.com/strategic-allied-consulting-morphs-issue-advocacy-partners">new evidence of another company calling itself “Issue Advocacy Partners.”</a> He documents help wanted ads, some posted as recently as September 26th, mirroring those published previously by Strategic Allied Consulting.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Similar ads were being posted in other states, namely Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York and New Jersey, for almost identical jobs with another entity, Issue Advocacy Partners,” writes Flynn. “Some of the listings are connected directly to Sproul’s Lincoln Strategy Group. Others use Sproul’s Tempe, AZ, business address for contact information.” [<em>Update: Since original publication on Thursday morning, <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627#comment-479649">Flynn writes in</a> to note that Issue Advocacy Partners has also now "popped up" in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana as well. "Also," he adds, "two former supervisors of Sproul's NC operation have moved to OH, one now hiring 'Voter Outreach Representatives.'"</em>]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Some of the ads specifically mention voter registration,” Flynn details, while others use “terms like ‘seeking to hire grassroots canvassers to identify conservative voters,’ ‘voter recruiter,’ ‘conservative voter identification,’ ‘voter ID,’ ‘identify conservative voters.’”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the ads Flynn found, posted on 9/27 and since removed, reads: “Issue Advocacy Partners is a conservative organization working to register voters as well as remind voters to vote conservatively in the upcoming election.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He writes that “Many of the postings use an email address with the domain issueadvocacypartners.com,” before, most damningly, showing that “The website located at issueadvocacypartners.com has an appearance that is almost identical to that of the original strategicalliedconsulting.com.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indeed, Flynn appears correct again.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here’s Strategic Allied Consulting’s one-page, generic looking website, <em>before</em> they replaced its only page with a long defense of their actions in the GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal …</font></p>

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">… And here’s the virtually identical page for <a href="http://issueadvocacypartners.com/">Issue Advocacy Partners</a>, as we screen-captured it on Wednesday night …</font>

</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From the evidence detailed above, it’s clear that, despite the RNC’s claim to have cut ties with Sproul and his own originally unqualified assertion that he and his companies were <em>not</em> ”still work[ing] for the RNC or other state or local parties,”<b> there is a great deal of evidence that his operations are still working on behalf of Republicans in California and Oregon under the name Grassroots Outreach, and in Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York and New Jersey under the name Issue Advocacy Partners.</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul has failed to respond to any more of our questions to date, so we’ve been unable to get his explanation for any of it, beyond what we’ve already shared, but now senior members of Congress are getting into the act, and are demanding answers themselves.</font>

<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Congressional Democrats seek answers about Sproul and his GOP operations</font></strong>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, three ranking members of high profile U.S. House committees sent a <a href="http://democrats.cha.house.gov/press-release/ranking-democrats-call-answers-republican-chairman-amid-allegations-voter-registration">letter to RNC Chair Reince Priebus</a> seeking more information about the RNC’s work with Sproul. It was signed by Democratic Reps. Charles Gonzalez, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Elections; John Conyers, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee; and Elijah Cummings, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight & Government Reform.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The letter, which cites reports on this matter by <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> in a <b>number of its footnotes, details the Republican Party’s “unfortunate history of voter suppression” and its “Years of illicit and unethical behavior” which “led to the 1982 consent decree under which the RNC agreed to ‘refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities’ or anything else that might ‘deter qualified voters from voting.’”</b></font>

<b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Despite your party’s requests over the past thirty years, federal courts have repeatedly declined to lift that decree,” the letter to Priebus continues. “The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on December 13, 2010, pointed to violations as recent as 2004 and found no evidence of ‘any significant change that renders prospective application of the Decree inequitable.’”</font></b>

<b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Congressmen then detail some of Sproul’s history, dating back to 2004, as well as the more recent concerns about his company:</font></b>

<div>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the 2004 campaign, operating as Sproul & Associates, it was reported that his firm fraudulently altered and destroyed voter registration forms in at least two states. The firm was paid at least $8 million for its work, although the precise amount is unclear from the RNC’s confusing financial disclosures. Apparently, the RNC was not dissatisfied with their work nor put off by their reputation because, in 2008, operating under the new name “Lincoln Strategy Group” the RNC again employed Mr. Sproul. In June of this year, the Romney campaign hired Mr. Sproul during the primary and has paid him at least $70,000. The RNC hired Mr. Sproul’s firm, under yet a third name, as your only vendor signing up new voters. This repeated affiliation of the RNC with a man of Mr. Sproul’s reputation for voter registration fraud and other forms of electoral skullduggery is deeply disturbing.</font>

</div>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Finally, they ask Chairman Priebus’ responses to five questions:</font></p>

<div>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1) Why did the RNC and your state affiliates hire a company run by a man with such a long history of improper behavior?</font></p>

</blockquote>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2) Was the Republican National Committee involved in the decision to change the name of Mr. Sproul’s company as he has alleged? Was this change in identity made in order to escape scrutiny for your decision to employ them?</font></p>

</blockquote>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3) For what other activities and in which states is Mr. Sproul or Strategic Allied Consulting engaged by or for the RNC or your affiliates?</font></p>

</blockquote>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4) Is Mr. Sproul doing business with the RNC under any other names?</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5) What steps are you or the RNC taking with your present and future contractors to ensure that neither this alleged fraud or abuse, nor anything similar, occurs again or elsewhere?</font>

</blockquote>

</div>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A spokesman for Gonzalez tells <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> that they have yet to hear back from Priebus, though their letter formally requests answers to those questions by next Tuesday, October 16th.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In our article last week reporting that the <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9609">Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement had opened an official criminal investigation of Sproul and his firm</a>, we also mentioned that a <a href="http://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/10/nathan-sproul-firm-probed-for-voter-registration-fraud-hires-criminal-defense-lawyer/">similar letter</a> was sent by Rep. Cummings seeking answers and documents from Sproul himself.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And, on Tuesday, <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/">The BRAD BLOG</a> has learned, Gonzalez sent similar letters <a href="http://bradblog.com/Docs/GonzalezLetter_Sproul_KarlRove_100912.pdf">to Karl Rove [PDF]</a> and <a href="http://bradblog.com/Docs/GonzalezLetter_Sproul_EdGillespie_100912.pdf">former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie [PDF]</a> seeking their explanation for the nearly one million dollars which American Crossroads, the nation’s second largest Super PAC, co-founded by the pair, paid to Sproul’s companies during this election cycle.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The letter to <b>Gillespie, who left American Crossroads to become a senior adviser to the Mitt Romney 2012 Presidential Campaign</b>, spells out Gonzalez’ concerns, and hopes that the powerful former RNC Chair might be able “to reassure the American public by helping to explain the story behind these contracts.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“American Crossroads, the Super PAC, which you and Karl Rove co-founded, paid at least $750,000 to companies run by Nathan Sproul, the founder of Strategic Allied Consulting,” writes the Congressman.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The Romney campaign has paid Sproul companies at least $71,000 in the past year. Mr. Sproul has a reputation tarnished by allegations of voter registration crimes stretching from North Carolina and Florida to Nevada and Oregon and at least back to back to 2004,” the letter reads. “By hiring his companies, the second largest Super PAC in the country and the campaign of the Republican presidential forerunning [<em>sic</em>] have affiliated themselves with him and supported his efforts. You can understand why Americans are troubled by the possible implications.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The letter then goes on to ask Gillespie for answers to four questions by October 23rd:</font></p>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1) For what purposes did American Crossroads hire Mr. Sproul and what services did he provide?</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2) Why would you associate yourself and your organization with a man like Mr. Sproul who has been dogged by so many allegations of voter registration fraud?</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3) In light of the newest revelations about Mr. Sproul’s activities, has Romney for President, Inc., severed its relationship with him? If not, what services are he or any of his companies now providing the campaign?</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4) Mr. Sproul told the Los Angeles Times that he created Strategic Allied Consulting at and kept his name off of its records to prevent anyone connecting the firm to him and his shady reputation at the request of the RNC. Have you, American Crossroads, or Romney for President done business with Mr. Sproul under any other names? If so, what were they, what services did he prove, and what was he paid?</font></div>

</blockquote>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The questions sent to Rove were virtually identical, though asked if American Crossroads had “severed its relationship with [Sproul] and all of his various companies,” before asking a fifth question:</font></p>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5) What were your dealings with Mr. Sproul or his companies while you were in the White House and during the 2000 and 2004 Presidential campaigns?</font></div>

</blockquote>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Answer to those questions for Rove, as well, are requested by Gonzalez by October 23, “so that every American who is eligible to vote may go to the polls on November 06 confident that neither you nor any of your political organizations is engaged in an effort to undermine the integrity of our electoral process.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For his part, Sproul vociferously defended his companies during our short time on record with him, pointing out that charges have never been brought against any of his companies over the years, despite evidence of improprieties in a number of states, during several election cycles — and despite requests for an “immediate investigation” from the George W. Bush Administration’s U.S. Dept. of Justice by Senators Patrick Leahy and Ted Kennedy as early as 2004 … back during the period when the Bush/Cheney campaign had reportedly paid more than $7 million to Sproul for his services during their re-election campaign.</font>

<a href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627"><em><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Cross-posted on The BRAD BLOG</font></em></a></p>

</div>

<dd>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Investigative journalist and broadcaster Brad Friedman is the creator and publisher of <a href="http://bradblog.com/">The BRAD Blog</a>. He has contributed to Mother Jones, The Guardian, Truthout, Huffington Post, The Trial Lawyer magazine and Editor & Publisher.</font></p>

</dd>

</dl>

</div>

<a href="http://www.salon.com/topic/nathan_sproul/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.salon.com/topic/nathan_sproul/</font></a></p>

<p><span class="postHeader"><span class="toLocalTime" data-tlt-epoch-time="1349125620"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monday, Oct 1, 2012 9:07 PM UTC</font></span></span></p>

<h1 id="entry-title-single" class="entry-title headline lg"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative operative’s sketchy past</font></h1>

<h2 class="deck"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This isn't the first time Nathan Sproul's efforts have come under scrutiny.</font></h2>

</div>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Republican Party is scrambling to cut ties from Strategic Allied Consulting, a consulting firm headed up by an infamous voter registration consultant Nathan Sproul. But, as Brad Friedman from Brad Blog has been <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/26/fla_voter_fraud_charge_has_ties_to_romney/">reporting</a>, Sproul and his firms have been consistently hired as consultants to Republicans despite their legal — and ethical — troubles. Here’s a brief history:</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>June 2004:</strong> Lincoln Strategies, a group headed by Nathan Sproul, <b>attempted to siphon votes away from John Kerry by pushing to get Ralph Nader on the ballot, </b>while also under the employ of the national Republican Party.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>October 2004:</strong> In Nevada and Oregon, former employees of the group Voters Outreach of America allege that they saw the company’s staff members<b> shredding registration forms from Democrats.  </b>VOA, another Sproul-run group, was paid $500,000 by the Republican National Committee for voter outreach. In Nevada, one former employee said in a lawsuit that he was told to ask prospective voters, “Who would you vote for in the next election?” and then to only register those who said they would vote for Bush. The employee added that he believes his pay was also docked because he registered members of both parties. In Minnesota in the same year, VOA was accused of firing employees who brought back Democratic voter registration forms. Other employees in West Virginia and Pennsylvania made similar allegations.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>October 2008:</strong> Despite the earlier concerns, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/20/mccain-employing-gop-oper_n_136254.html">reported</a> that “a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the RNC and the the California Republican Party, made a $175,000 payment to the group Lincoln Strategy in June for purposes of ‘registering voters.’” In addition, Stein reported, the RNC paid Sproul’s firm $37,000 that election cycle.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>June 2012:</strong> Lee Fang of the <a href="http://www.republicreport.org/2012/romney-nathan-sproul/">Republic Report</a> reported late last year that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign quietly hired Sproul’s firm as a consultant. Sproul’s company, this time called Associates to Lincoln Strategies, received about $70,000 from Romney’s campaign.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>September 2012:</strong> Flash forward to last week, when the Republican Party of Florida abruptly cut ties to Strategic Allied Consulting, after it discovered that the group had turned in over 100 fraudulent voter registration forms to a local election board.  The Florida GOP had paid the firm, headed up by Sproul, of course, over $1.3 million to register new voters.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shortly after, the state Republican Party in North Carolina followed Florida’s lead and <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/01/3028909/nc-gop-fires-voter-sign-up-firm.html">fired</a> Sproul’s firm, as <a href="http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/27/14126789-rnc-cuts-ties-with-firm-over-voter-fraud-allegations?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter">did</a> the Republican National Committee.</font></p>

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<dd>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jillian Rayfield is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on politics. Follow her on Twitter at @jillrayfield or email her at jrayfield@salon.com.</font></p>

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<a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/10/01/a_history_of_the_gops_favorite_voter_registration_professional/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.salon.com/2012/10/01/a_history_of_the_gops_favorite_voter_registration_professional/</font></a>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wednesday, Sep 26, 2012 6:07 PM UTC</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fla. voter registration fraud charge has ties to Romney</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Florida GOP fires firm linked to Romney after suspicious voter forms reported</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Brad Friedman</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Behind the GOP's voter fraud hysteria</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This piece originally appeared on The Brad Blog.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Republican Party of Florida’s top recipient of 2012 expenditures, a firm by the name of Strategic Allied Consulting, was just fired on Tuesday night, after more than 100 apparently fraudulent voter registration forms were discovered to have been turned in by the group to the Palm Beach County, FL Supervisor of Elections.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The firm appears to be another shell company of Nathan Sproul, a longtime, notorious Republican operative, hired year after year by GOP Presidential campaigns, despite being accused of shredding Democratic voter registration forms in a number of states over several past elections.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Strategic Allied Consulting has been paid some $667,000 this year by the Florida GOP, presumably to run its voter registration campaigns in the state. That number, however, does not account for another identical payment made in August. The Palm Beach Post is reporting tonight that the firm received “more than $1.3 million” from the Republican Party of Florida “to register new voters.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The firm is not only tied to the Florida GOP, but also to the Mitt Romney Campaign, which hired Sproul as a political consultant late last year, despite years of fraud allegations against his organizations in multiple states.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moreover, the firm is also reportedly operating similar voter registration operations on behalf of the Republican Party, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a number of key battleground states this year, including North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado. Strategic Allied has recently taken steps to hide their ownership by Sproul’s notorious firm, Sproul & Associates.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Palm Beach County Supervisor of Election Susan Bucher confirmed to The BRAD BLOG late this evening that she turned over 106 suspicious voter registration applications to the Florida State Attorney during a meeting yesterday afternoon in Palm Beach, after the “questionable” applications were submitted to her office by a worker for Strategic Allied.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The forms were said to all have similar signatures, changed addresses and party affiliations, and other defects which appear to have all been done by the same hand.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The case emerging in Florida tonight mirrors a similar incident reported earlier this year in which more than a thousand fraudulent voter registration forms were discovered to have been turned in to the Sacramento County, CA Registrar of Voters by a group hired by that state’s Republican Party.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Strategic Allied Consulting is not the only case of its kind, as a massive GOP voter registration scheme, which could involve the upper-echelons of the national party, appears to be underway.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘Questionable’ registrations in Palm Beach</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Palm Beach Post reports tonight that Bucher turned the “questionable” applications over to Florida State Attorney Peter Antonacci and Chief Assistant State Attorney Paul Zacks during a meeting on Monday in “an abundance of caution” after her staff “had questions about similar-looking signatures, missing information and wrong addresses on the forms.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The paper reports that “some of the applications she questioned were for new voter registrations while others were for address or party affiliation changes or requests for new voter cards.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the FL Election Code, the alteration of a “voter registration application…without the other person’s knowledge and consent” is a third degree felony, punishable by a $5,000 fine and up to five years in jail.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Similarly, the willful submission of “any false voter registration information” is also a third degree felony. (Just don’t tell fading GOP superstar Ann Coulter that, since she submitted fraudulent information on her own voter registration form — in Palm Beach County, FL, coincidentally — back in 2005, before knowingly voting at the wrong precinct illegally, as The BRAD BLOG has covered in great detail here over the years. See BradBlog.com/CoulterFraud for full documentation.)</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Post reports that “The 106 applications flagged by Bucher were part of a batch of 304 turned in Sept. 5 by the contractor, using the Republican Party of Florida’s identification number.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As of tonight, the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) says they have fired the firm, which they claim they had hired at the request of the Republican National Party.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When we learned today about the instances of potential voter registration fraud that occurred in Palm Beach County,” RPOF Director Mike Grissom said, “we immediately informed the Republican National Committee that we were terminating the contract with the voter registration vendor we hired at their request because there is no place for voter registration fraud in Florida.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Palm Beach Post reports that Strategic Allied Consulting was given “identical payments of $667,598 in July and August” by the RPOF.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strategic Allied Consulting</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strategic Allied Consulting, which has only a single-page, generic website (including typos, as seen above) has been advertising for paid registration workers on “Craigslist, Monster Jobs, Jobs Indeed, Conservative Jobs, etc.,” according to a source who has been researching them over the past several days.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Late last month, Greg Flynn at the North Carolina blog BlueNC reported on some of their job listings seeking workers in that swing-state, which Obama narrowly won in 2008, offering to pay anywhere from $11 to $13 per hour.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“WANT TO HELP REPUBLICANS WIN IN NC?,” reads one ad, “We are currently hiring self-motivated people to contact voters for the election. No experience needed! We are paying $13/per hour for this program.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Are you interested in helping Mitt Romney win North Carolina?,” reads another, “I am with the North Carolina Republican Party working with Voter Registration Projects and am looking for team members to help expand Republican voter registration.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Republican Voter Registration Captains Needed,” begins another, requesting applicants submit resumes to John Bria of Strategic Allied Consulting. “Help GOP candidates win in November and become an integral part a [sic] presidential campaign.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Employees will go to high traffic areas, identify conservative voters, ensure that their voter registration is up to date, and then report back at night with their data and the voter registration forms that they collected.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Curiously, that’s exactly what is seen in a staggering viral video The BRAD BLOG reported on this morning revealing a young voter registration worker in Colorado Springs, CO (El Paso County), asking a potential registrant, “Would you vote for Romney or Obama?” before she would offer a voter registration form. While the worker, when pressed, reluctantly admitted, “we’re out here in support of Romney,” she then claimed to be working for the El Paso County Clerk’s office.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, as The BRAD BLOG reported, the El Paso County Republican Party Chairman has since admitted the young lady was working for the party. Following publication of this story, The BRAD BLOG was informed by a tipster that the young lady was actually hired by a third-party contractor, though that point has not yet been confirmed, nor the name of the contractor identified.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BlueNC reports, however, that, in addition to FEC campaign filings showing the NC Republican Party paid some $333,000 to Strategic Allied Consulting for services in that state in July, “There is evidence that similar operations are being conducted in Colorado, Florida and Virginia on behalf of the Republican Party.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Was the young worker in Colorado Springs hired by Strategic Allied Consulting for her work with the local GOP? The techniques described in the NC help wanted ads sound very familiar to what was seen on video tape in CO.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At BlueNC, Flynn reports “The company was set up in Virginia in June 2012 and filings with the Virginia Secretary of State reveal no identifying information other than that of a corporate filing service.” He adds: “There is no evidence of business registration in either North Carolina, Colorado, or Florida (or Arizona),” where Sproul’s Sproul & Associates is based.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the time of BlueNC’s report, the domain StrategicAlliedConsulting.com was registered to Sproul & Associates in Tempe, Arizona. The day after they published their report, the domain name registration was quickly changed to “private”, but not before Flynn was able to grab a screen shot confirming the ownership of the domain:</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The notorious Nathan Sproul</font>

<b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The BRAD BLOG has reported on Sproul many times over the years, as the GOP operative, and former chair of the Arizona GOP and the state’s Christian Coalition, pops up again and again in each Presidential Election year. He is hired over and over by the Republican Party, despite years of fraud allegations in multiple states against his organizations, which are said to have routinely changed or entirely destroyed Democratic voter registrations. He operates as Sproul & Associates as well as Lincoln Strategy Group, among other names, including now, apparently, Strategic Allied Consulting. And this year, after being hired by the Bush/Cheney campaign in ’04 and the McCain/Palin campaign in ’08, Sproul was “quietly” hired by the Romney campaign as a political consultant late last year, according to a June report from Lee Fang at the non-partisan Republic Report:</font></b>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   Late last year, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign began paying Nathan Sproul, a political consultant with a long history of destroying Democratic voter registration forms and manipulating ballot initiatives. Sproul, who changed his firm’s name from Sproul and Associates to Lincoln Strategies, has received over $70,000 from Romney’s campaign.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   Republic Report reviewed disclosures from the Federal Elections Commission. Sproul’s Lincoln Strategy Group has received about $71,391 in payments for “field consulting” and “rent & utilities” by the Romney for President Inc. committee from November 30th through March 2nd of this year.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fang then goes on to highlight what he describes as some of Sproul’s “greatest hits,” as detailed by ThinkProgress, while reporting on Sproul’s Lincoln Strategies astroturf work for a so-called “Clean Coal” industry campaign in 2009 [emphasis in original]:</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   - In Oregon and Nevada, Lincoln Strategies – then known as Sproul and Associates - was investigated for destroying Democratic voter registration forms. The Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign paid Sproul $7.4 million for campaign work. [CNN, 10/14/04; KGW News, 10/13/04; East Valley Tribune, 09/07/06]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   - In Nevada, people who registered as Democrats with Lincoln Strategies – then known as Sproul and Associates – found their names absent from the voter registration rolls. [Reno Gazette-Journal, 10/29/04]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   - During the 2006 midterm elections, Wal-Mart banned Lincoln Strategies for partisan voter registration efforts in Tennessee. The Republican National Committee had hired the firm. [Associated Press, 08/24/06]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   - In Arizona, Lincoln Strategies employed a variety of deceptive tactics – including systematically lying about the bill – to push a ballot initiative to eviscerate the state’s clean elections law. [Salon,10/21/04]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   - Lincoln Strategies, then employed by the Republican Party, was behind efforts to place Ralph Nader on the ballot in states such as Arizona. [The American Prospect, 06/25/04]</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite all of those years of allegations, the McCain campaign went on to hire Sproul in 2008, according to Sam Stein at Huffington Post, who reported at the time:</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   John McCain’s campaign has directed $175,000 to the firm of a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   According to campaign finance records, a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the RNC and the California Republican Party, made a $175,000 payment to the group Lincoln Strategy in June for purposes of “registering voters.” The managing partner of that firm is Nathan Sproul, a renowned GOP operative who has been investigated on multiple occasions for suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms and even spearheading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to hinder the Democratic ticket</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   That Sproul would come under the employment umbrella of the McCain campaign — the Republican National Committee has also separately paid Lincoln Strategy at least $37,000 for voter registration efforts this cycle — is not terribly surprising. Sproul, who has donated nearly $30,000 to McCain’s campaign, has been in the good graces of GOP officials for the past decade despite charges of ethical and potentially legal wrongdoing.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Fang’s report, he goes on to note that “Even former Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), during a hearing on voter fraud, admitted that ‘the difference between ACORN and Sproul is that ACORN doesn’t throw away or change registration documents after they have been filled out.’”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GOP voter registration fraud epidemic continues</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As The BRAD BLOG described earlier today, in our story on the disturbing Colorado GOP voter registration worker video, while Republicans had long been critical of fraudulent voter registration efforts they inaccurately attributed to ACORN, the non-partisan, four-decade old community organizing group (which has since been forced into bankruptcy as a result of the years-long GOP effort to mischaracterize them and their work) there is no evidence, to our knowledge, that any of its tens of thousands of registration workers ever screened out potential registrants from one party or another before allowing them to register, as seen in CO.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neither is there evidence that any of their workers ever changed party affiliations on registration forms, as is being alleged tonight in Palm Beach County, or destroyed Democratic forms, as has been alleged over the years, as noted by Republican Rep. Cannon.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moreover, it should be noted that of the handful of ACORN registration workers who submitted fraudulent applications over the years, almost all of those workers were turned into officials by ACORN themselves. The group checked all applications for validity before turning them in, flagged those which appeared to be fraudulent, and then turned them in to officials, along with the names of the workers who had defrauded them.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Contrast that with the activities of Sproul & Associates, Lincoln Strategies and now Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting, along with what was admitted to by the Republican Party today in Colorado, and revealed by a number of recent cases of massive registration fraud by the Republican Party in California. <b>(For the record, ACORN was never hired to do registration work by the Democratic Party, despite inaccurate Republican claims to the contrary.)</b></font>

<b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2006, GOP voter registration firms in California were reported by the LA Times to have turned in thousands of invalid registration forms, as well as fraudulent signatures on petitions in San Bernardino County. In once instance, “About 4,800 of more than 5,600 signatures submitted [by John Burkett Petition Management] were found to be invalid and were tossed out by election officials,” the paper reported.</font></b>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In 2008, at the height of that year’s GOP/Fox “News” ACORN “voter fraud” scam, a group calling itself Young Political Majors (YPM) was hired by the CA Republican Party to do voter registration. The firm was reportedly paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP. YPM was subsequently found to have been changing thousands of voter registration forms from Democratic to Republican. The group’s CEO, Mark Anthony Jacoby, was eventually arrested </b>(see video of my appearance announcing the news on Fox in a live “Fox News Alert” that year) before he later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And, earlier this year, in 2012, the Sacramento Republican Party was found to have hired Momentum Political Services, a firm headed up by a woman described as a“professional con-artist”. The group allegedly turned in thousands of fraudulent voter registrations as part of a $50,000 bounty scheme seeking Republican registrations, as paid for by the GOP in the district of Republican Congressman <b>Dan Lungren</b>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All the while, Republicans were loudly accusing Democrats of committing “voter fraud” requiring polling place Photo ID restrictions to stop it, even though there are just 10 known cases of in-person impersonation — the only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by Photo ID — out of hundreds of millions of votes cast in all 50 states since 2000, according to a recent exhaustive report by the non-partisan investigative news consortium, News21.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps it’s a case of projection. Or maybe the GOP knows about the fraud that they’re carrying out, so they presume that Democrats must be doing something similar. Nonetheless, when it comes to voter registration fraud, Republicans are the champs, hands down. And it remains to be seen how wide and how high this story will go. This one may have legs.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As to actual voter fraud, it’s Republicans — and very high profile ones at that, including Mitt Romney himself — who are winning that contest as well. See The BRAD BLOG’s recent report detailing 10+ recent cases of voter fraud and other related election fraud crimes by high profile Republicans right here.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">   Investigative journalist and broadcaster Brad Friedman is the creator and publisher of The BRAD Blog. He has contributed to Mother Jones, The Guardian, Truthout, Huffington Post, The Trial Lawyer magazine and Editor & Publisher.</font>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Nathan Sproul</b> founded <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sproul_%26_Associates" title="Sproul & Associates" class="mw-redirect">Sproul & Associates</a> in 2003. The firm's name was later changed to <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group" title="Lincoln Strategy Group">Lincoln Strategy Group</a>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prior to founding Sproul & Associates, Sproul served as the Executive Director for the Arizona Republican Party.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul "has been investigated on multiple occasions for suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms and even spearheading efforts to get <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ralph_Nader" title="Ralph Nader">Ralph Nader</a> on ballots to hinder the Democratic ticket." In June 2008, "a joint committee of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_McCain" title="John McCain">McCain</a>-<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sarah_Palin" title="Sarah Palin">Palin</a> campaign, the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/RNC" title="RNC" class="mw-redirect">RNC</a> and the the California Republican Party, made a $175,000 payment to the group Lincoln Strategy ... for purposes of 'registering voters.'" <sup id="cite_ref-0" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul#cite_note-0">[1]</a></sup></font></p>

<h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Contents</font></h2>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul#Articles_and_resources"><span class="tocnumber">1</span> <span class="toctext">Articles and resources</span></a>

</font><ul>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul#Related_SourceWatch_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">1.1</span> <span class="toctext">Related SourceWatch articles</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul#References"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">1.2</span> <span class="toctext">References</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul#External_resources"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">1.3</span> <span class="toctext">External resources</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-5"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul#External_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">1.4</span> <span class="toctext">External articles</span></font></a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

<h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Articles_and_resources"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Articles and resources</font></span></h2>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="Related_SourceWatch_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Related SourceWatch articles</font></span></h3>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group" title="Lincoln Strategy Group"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Lincoln Strategy Group</font></a></li>

</ul>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="References"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">References</font></span></h3>

<li id="cite_note-0"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul#cite_ref-0">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">Sam Stein, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/20/mccain-employing-gop-oper_n_136254.html">McCain Employing GOP Operative Accused Of Voter Registration Fraud</a>," Huffington Post, October 20, 2008.</span></font></li>

</ol>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="External_resources"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">External resources</font></span></h3>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="External_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">External articles</font></span></h3>

<table style=" margin: 0.5em 0.57em 0.5em 0.7em; border-collapse: collapse; background: #fffacd; border: 1px solid #dad26d;"><tbody><tr><td style=" width: 100%; padding: .25em .25em 0.25em .25em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This article is a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub">stub</a>. <i>You</i> can <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub">help</a></b> by <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Nathan_Sproul&action=edit">expanding it</a>.</font></td><td><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

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<div id="mw-normal-catlinks" class="mw-normal-catlinks"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:Categories" title="Special:Categories">Categories</a>:

</font><ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:People" title="Category:People"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">People</font></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Politics_%28U.S.%29" title="Category:Politics (U.S.)"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Politics (U.S.)</font></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Elections_%28U.S.%29" title="Category:Elections (U.S.)"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Elections (U.S.)</font></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Political_campaign_consultants" title="Category:Political campaign consultants"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Political campaign consultants</font></a></li>

</ul>

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading"><span dir="auto"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lincoln Strategy Group</font></span></h1>

<div id="jump-to-nav" class="mw-jump"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jump to: <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#mw-head">navigation</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#p-search">search</a></font></div>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Lincoln Strategy Group</b> is the new name of the political consulting and PR firm previously known as <b>Sproul and Associates</b>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In June 2008, "a joint committee of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_McCain" title="John McCain">McCain</a>-<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sarah_Palin" title="Sarah Palin">Palin</a> campaign, the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/RNC" title="RNC" class="mw-redirect">RNC</a> and the the California Republican Party, made a $175,000 payment to the group Lincoln Strategy ... for purposes of 'registering voters.'" The contract was controversial, as the firm (under its previous name, Sproul and Associates) "has been investigated on multiple occasions for suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms and even spearheading efforts to get <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ralph_Nader" title="Ralph Nader">Ralph Nader</a> on ballots to hinder the Democratic ticket." <sup id="cite_ref-0" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-0">[1]</a></sup></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul" title="Nathan Sproul">Nathan Sproul</a>, who was formerly the executive director of the Arizona State Republican Party, founded Sproul and Associates in 2002 and is based in Tempe, Arizona. Sproul and Associates has worked in 21 different states for various city, state, congressional, and national campaigns. Sproul specializes in campaign/public affairs management, get-out-the vote efforts, ballot initiative management, media and public relations. <sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-1">[2]</a></sup></font></p>

<h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Contents</font></h2>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#Controversy_over_2004_presidential_work"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">1</span> <span class="toctext">Controversy over 2004 presidential work</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#Personnel"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">2</span> <span class="toctext">Personnel</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#Contact"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">3</span> <span class="toctext">Contact</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#Articles_and_resources"><span class="tocnumber">4</span> <span class="toctext">Articles and resources</span></a>

</font><ul>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-5"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#Related_SourceWatch_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">4.1</span> <span class="toctext">Related SourceWatch articles</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#References"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">4.2</span> <span class="toctext">References</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#External_resources"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">4.3</span> <span class="toctext">External resources</span></font></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-8"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#External_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="tocnumber">4.4</span> <span class="toctext">External articles</span></font></a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

<h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Controversy_over_2004_presidential_work"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Controversy over 2004 presidential work</font></span></h2>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul is a private company who hired <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Voters_Outreach_of_America" title="Voters Outreach of America">Voters Outreach of America</a> to work on a national canvassing project (sometimes referred to as "America Votes," but unrelated to the liberal leaning <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/527_committee" title="527 committee" class="mw-redirect">527 group</a> with <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/America_Votes" title="America Votes">that name</a>) was accused of fraud aimed at preventing Democrats from voting in the 2004 U.S. elections. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Voters_Outreach_of_America" title="Voters Outreach of America">Voters Outreach of America</a> is run by Aaron James in Nevada. <sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-2">[3]</a></sup></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One Nevada worker hired by Voters Outreach of America, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Eric_Russell&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Eric Russell (page does not exist)">Eric Russell</a>, "said he was instructed to register only Republicans, and that he saw a supervisor tear up completed registration forms from Democrats." <sup id="cite_ref-3" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-3">[4]</a></sup> "As best I can tell, the incident he [Russell] alleges didn't happen," Sproul said. "It caused great discomfort for me, my family and my business. <sup id="cite_ref-4" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-4">[5]</a></sup></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">West Virginia worker <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lisa_Bragg&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Lisa Bragg (page does not exist)">Lisa Bragg</a> told <i>Salon.com</i> a similar story: "Workers were asked to congregate outside local convenience stores and pretend to be nonpartisan political pollsters interested in the nuances of local opinion. ... But if the respondents to this pretend poll said that they were Bush supporters, canvassers were told to offer to help them register to vote. If they said they were Kerry supporters, the canvassers would politely walk away." In Pennsylvania, workers were told to ask if undecided voters considered themselves pro-life or pro-choice. "If the voters were pro-life, they were to be registered. [But, the employee script read:] 'If they are pro-choice, say thank you and walk away.'" <sup id="cite_ref-Manjoo_5-0" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-Manjoo-5">[6]</a></sup></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2004 Arizona Republican Party Executive Director Bill Christiansen stated "Nathan Sproul is a victim of shamelss statements by the Democrats who will say anything to win". <sup id="cite_ref-6" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-6">[7]</a></sup></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nathan_Sproul" title="Nathan Sproul">Nathan Sproul</a> was the former Executive Director of the Arizona Republican Party. <sup id="cite_ref-7" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-7">[8]</a></sup>Sproul and Associates was paid more than $8,000,000 [<a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/parties/expenddetail.asp?txtName=SPROUL+%26+ASSOCIATES%2CINC&Cmte=RPC&cycle=2004">[2]</a>] by the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Republican_National_Committee" title="Republican National Committee">Republican National Committee</a> in 2004. <sup id="cite_ref-Manjoo_5-1" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-Manjoo-5">[6]</a></sup></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul and Associates had managed an earlier campaign to repeal Arizona's popular Clean Elections system, an effort in which it got 280,000 signatures. "No Taxpayer Money for Politicians," the effort to repeal Clean Elections, did not go unnoticed by the opposing campaign: "Even though their measure repealed Clean Elections, canvassers would say either that the measure didn't alter Clean Elections in any way, or that it actually helped Clean Elections. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bob_Grossfeld&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Bob Grossfeld (page does not exist)">Bob Grossfeld</a>, the Democratic political consultant, secretly videotaped one canvasser peddling this lie." <sup id="cite_ref-Manjoo_5-2" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-Manjoo-5">[6]</a></sup></font></p>

<h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Personnel"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Personnel</font></span></h2>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From news accounts: <sup id="cite_ref-8" class="reference"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_note-8">[9]</a></sup></font></p>

<ul>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nathan Sproul</font></li>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jessica_Pacheco&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Jessica Pacheco (page does not exist)">Jessica Pacheco</a>, former Arizona Chamber of Commerce lobbyist</font></li>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Garrick_Taylor&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Garrick Taylor (page does not exist)">Garrick Taylor</a>, "former Arizona GOP spinmeister"</font></li>

</ul>

<h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Contact"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Contact</font></span></h2>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sproul & Associates

80 East Rio Salado Parkway, Suite 814

Tempe, AZ

Phone:(480) 303- 7175

Website: <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.sproulassociates.com">http://www.sproulassociates.com</a>

Email: info AT sproulassociates.com</font></p>

<h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Articles_and_resources"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Articles and resources</font></span></h2>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="Related_SourceWatch_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Related SourceWatch articles</font></span></h3>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/U.S._election_irregularities_in_2004" title="U.S. election irregularities in 2004"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">U.S. election irregularities in 2004</font></a></li>

</ul>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="References"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">References</font></span></h3>

<li id="cite_note-0"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-0">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">Sam Stein, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/20/mccain-employing-gop-oper_n_136254.html">McCain Employing GOP Operative Accused Of Voter Registration Fraud</a>," Huffington Post, October 20, 2008.</span></font></li>

<li id="cite_note-1"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-1">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">Sproul & Associates, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sproulassociates.com/services.html">Services</a>", accessed August 2007.</span></font></li>

<li id="cite_note-3"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-3">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">Ken Ritter, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2004/oct/15/10150497.html">Nevada judge declines to reopen voter registration in Vegas area</a>," <i>Associated Press</i>, October 15, 2004.</span></font></li>

<li id="cite_note-4"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-4">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">Beth DeFalco, "GOP Operative Under Fire Over Tactics," Associated Press, October 29, 2004.</span></font></li>

<li id="cite_note-Manjoo-5"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">↑ <sup><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-Manjoo_5-0">6.0</a></sup> <sup><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-Manjoo_5-1">6.1</a></sup> <sup><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-Manjoo_5-2">6.2</a></sup> <span class="reference-text">Farhad Manjoo, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/10/21/sproul/index.html?pn=1">Sproul Play</a>," <i>Salon.com</i>, October 21, 2004.</span></font></li>

<li id="cite_note-6"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-6">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">Beth DeFalco, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://opp-researcher.blogspot.com/2004_10_24_archive.html">GOP operative under fire over voter-registration tactics</a>", <i>San Franciso Chronicle</i>, October 28, 2004. (This is an Associated Press story).</span></font></li>

<li id="cite_note-7"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-7">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">Ken Ritter, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2004/oct/15/101510497.html">Nevada judge declines to reopen voter registration in Vegas area</a>," <i>Associated Press</i>, October 15, 2004.</span></font></li>

<li id="cite_note-8"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lincoln_Strategy_Group#cite_ref-8">↑</a> <span class="reference-text">"Lobbying firm adding names fast," <i>The Arizona Republic</i> (Phoenix), December 9, 2007.</span></font></li>

</ol>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="External_resources"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">External resources</font></span></h3>

<ul>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://esos.state.nv.us/SOSServices/AnonymousAccess/CorpSearch/CorpDetails.aspx?lx8nvq=nyhOMCXqc9Of58EkNzA%252fZg%253d%253d">Voters Outreach of America's incorporation documents</a>, Nevada Secretary of State.</font></li>

</ul>

<h3><span class="mw-headline" id="External_articles"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">External articles</font></span></h3>

<ul>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Max Blumenthal, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Voters_Outreach_of_America">http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Voters_Outreach_of_America</a><i>AlterNet</i>, October 15, 2004.</font></li>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/2005/06/team-bush-paid-millions-to-nathan.html">"Team Bush paid MILLIONS to Nathan Sproul-and tried to hide it!"</a>, June 30, 2005: Sproul received total payments from the RNC adding up "to a whopping $8,359,161--making it the RNC’s eighth biggest expenditure of the 2004 campaign." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michael_Retzer" title="Michael Retzer">Michael Retzer</a>, as RNC Treasurer, made the payments.</font></li>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Farhad Manjoo, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/10/21/sproul/index.html?pn=1">Sproul Play</a>," <i>Salon.com</i>, October 21, 2004.</font></li>

<li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dennis Welch, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/70894">Arizonan is GOP's top voter sign-up guru- and gets complaints from Democrats</a>", Associated Press via <i>Tucson Citizen</i>, October 27, 2004.</font></li>

</ul>

</div>

</font><ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Public_relations_firms" title="Category:Public relations firms"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Public relations firms</font></a></li>

</ul>

</div>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) has frequently touted himself as a defender of electoral integrity, but on Tuesday the governor appeared to duck questions about an investigation into a GOP-linked voter registration group that has been accused of engaging in widespread fraud that could <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/08/3040961/in-voter-registration-fraud-case.html" target="_hplink">create complications</a> for thousands of voters in his state.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A third-party voter registration firm called Strategic Allied Consulting -- run by <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/170198/gop-quietly-hires-firm-tied-voter-fraud-scandal-work-battleground-states" target="hplink">controversial GOP consultant</a> Nathan Sproul -- was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/27/rnc-voter-fraud_n_1921223.html" target="hplink">fired by the Florida GOP and RNC</a> last month after the Florida Division of Elections filed a complaint regarding a number of suspicious forms being turned in around the state. The probe has since widened, and the <em>Miami Herald</em> <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/08/3040961/in-voter-registration-fraud-case.html" target="_hplink">reported Tuesday</a> that a particularly nefarious type of fraud, in which operatives re-register or change voters' information without their knowledge, could lead to unpredictable Election Day obstacles for a large number of Floridians.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The [Republican National Committee] and the [Republican Party of Florida], they’ve done the right thing," Scott told reporters, <a href="http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2012/10/voter-fraud-amendments-supreme-court-scott-opts-not-to-weigh-in-on-thorny-issues.html" target="_hplink">according to the <em>Miami Herald</em></a>. "As soon as they had an inkling, they fired the group that was doing that. Again, it’s the right thing to do. If somebody is doing the wrong thing, they shouldn’t be registering voters in our state. So they’re doing the right thing."</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressed by reporters on how these developing concerns might damage the credibility of Florida Republicans, who have promoted <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/florida-voter-purge-ruling_n_1941066.html" target="hplink">repeated</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/11/rick-scott-florida-suing-government-voter-purge_n_1588012.html" target="hplink">voter purge efforts</a> as supposed proof of their commitment to the integrity of elections, Scott sidestepped.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"My focus is on making sure that I tell people all the time, that in our state, I want people to go register to vote," Scott said, <a href="http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2012/10/voter-fraud-amendments-supreme-court-scott-opts-not-to-weigh-in-on-thorny-issues.html" target="_hplink">according to the <em>Herald</em></a>. "They need to go talk to the candidates. When you’re running for office, when you’re in your community or in your state, vet the candidates, get involved, pick your candidates, support them, and then go out the vote. That’s where my focus is."</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, however, Scott appeared focused on touting his support for voter purges, while again ignoring the controversy regarding alleged instances of voter registration fraud from Strategic Allied Consulting....<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/rick-scott-voter-registration-fraud_n_1951774.html?ref=topbar">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/rick-scott-voter-registration-fraud_n_1951774.html?ref=topbar</a></font></p>