Fla. Voter Registration Fraud Expands To 10 Counties

Illustrating that voter registration fraud is a bipartisan problem, a politically-connected vendor hired by the Republican Party to sign up new voters is under investigation for turning in suspicious forms with questionable information.  

The scandal broke several weeks ago in south Florida’s Palm Beach County where the supervisor of elections set off a statewide probe after discovering questionable forms coming from Strategic Allied Consulting, an Arizona-based firm. The Republican National Committee (RNC) has paid Strategic Allied Consulting $3 million to register new voters in several states, according to news reports, and Florida’s GOP has doled out an additional $1.3 million.

Now the number of counties in Florida, a key battleground state, that have reported questionable voter registration forms connected to the consulting firm has grown to 10. The tainted forms include discrepancies in addresses, signatures and other identifying information. The scandal has led the RNC and several of its state chapters to fire Strategic Allied Consulting, which is under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

One of Florida’s largest newspapers went so far as to compare this to the rampant, nationwide voter registration fraud caused by the “community group” ACORN during the 2008 presidential election (read all about that in a Judicial Watch special report). “Remember all that talk from Republicans about voter fraud?  Well, it ain’t just for ACORN anymore,” the paper’s political reporter writes in a story published over the weekend. .   

Though any allegation of voter fraud is serious and must be thoroughly investigated by authorities, it seems a bit premature to compare this to the massive ACORN scandal that rocked the last presidential election. Seventy ACORN employees in 12 states have been convicted of voter registration fraud and a congressional report revealed that more than one-third of the 1.3 million registrants submitted by the group in the 2008 election cycle were invalid.

Whether the fraud is tied to Republicans or Democrats, Judicial Watch is monitoring this closely through its 2012 Election Integrity Project to assure that voter rolls are as clean as required by federal law. Through publicly available data, JW has already discovered that voter rolls in several states—including Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Florida, Alabama, California and Colorado—contain the names of individuals who are not eligible to vote.