GOP Hired the Right Crook for the Voter Suppression Job

It should be a scandal eclipsing Mitt's 47-percent comments -- but it's not.


[Raw Story:]

The Republican National Committee fired a voter registration firm owned by a paid consultant to the party’s presidential candidate Mitt Romney Thursday, after Florida officials traced more than 100 possibly fake registration forms back to the company.

NBC News reported that the RNC cut ties with Strategic Allied Consulting (SAC), run by party strategist Nathan Sproul, had been paid $2.9 million this year to register voters in five swing states before being dismissed.

Sproul is also the founder and managing partner of another company, Lincoln Strategy Group, which records show was paid by the Romney campaign paid to do “field consulting.”


The Romney campaign told NBC News, "We used this vendor for signature gathering services during the primary but have not used them since 2011." The question should be why Romney or the RNC hired Sproul at all. The man should be washed up and unemployable in the voter registration business -- or in anything to do with elections.

Mark Crispin Miller reported in 2005 that Sproul's Strategic Allied Consulting "got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms." Miller's report is damning.

And here Sproul is, doing exactly the same thing again. And here Republicans are, hiring this crook again. If this was the sort of thing they wanted to avoid, they've gone about avoiding it in exactly the wrong way. We can only assume that Sproul is an illegal voter suppression expert and that the GOP and the Romney campaign hired him for exactly those skills; as I said, the man should be considered unemployable otherwise. He's really useless for anything else. And Sproul's not the only one out there.

I'm going to keep writing the same phrase until everyone starts repeating it: the enemies of democracy are the enemies of freedom. Free people get to vote. And people who try to undermine and cheat democracy are not democracy's friends. The GOP is trying to undermine and cheat democracy. They only fired Sproul because he got caught. You hire Strategic Allied Consulting because you want them to do this stuff. There is no other reason to hire them.

Combined with their push for suppressive voter ID laws, it's becoming eminently clear that Republicans are trying to do away with free and fair elections and replace them with rigged games. They oppose democracy. Therefore, they oppose freedom.

We need everyone to get out and vote in November -- Republicans can't possibly keep every non-Republican away from the polls. You need to get out and vote to cover those whose votes were stolen. If they get away with it this time, next time they'll be even worse.

-Wisco

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