Partisan Registration Drives Raise Specter of Fraud 
By Richard Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writers

LAS VEGAS Broke, disabled and living at the Daisy Motel in downtown Las Vegas, Tyrone Mrasek Sr. took a temporary job late this summer registering voters here.

The employer primarily wanted President Bush supporters, but they were not easy to find. So Mrasek handed out cigarettes to drunkards and ex-felons at a homeless shelter in exchange for signatures. Later he found a stack of signed registrations for Democratic voters in a trash can outside the company's office, he recalled.

"They had some shady things going on," Mrasked said.

Partisan registration drives have swept through battleground states such as Nevada, Ohio and New Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of new registrations have poured into county and state offices and strained the systems in these states.

But as workers closely examined some forms, they found clear cases of fraud. In some instances, stacks of registrations had the same handwriting. In others, names were lifted from phone books and signatures forged. And many of the new registrations were duplicates of already registered voters.

Financed by political parties, wealthy advocacy groups and grass-roots organizations, both liberal and conservative organizations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to register voters. The crush, along with the irregular registrations, has bred chaos across the nation.

"We were getting stacks of forms with identical handwriting," said Harvard L. Lomax, registrar of Clark County here. "We were getting calls from people wanting to know why they were getting registration forms when they hadn't asked for one. If you went to a DMV office over the last five months, you were mobbed by people trying to register you, claiming they were working for us. It was obvious it was fraud."

The presidential outcome is expected to be very close, and voter-registration fraud could well become this year's hanging chad. If so, it will be an issue that the losing party can seize upon to argue in the courts that the election was flawed.

After the disputed 2000 presidential election, new federal rules were supposed to insure that voter-registration lists were more accurate and current. Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which required every state to have a computerized statewide registration list that would be instantly d with each new registration.

But 37 states have failed to meet the new standards and sought waivers from the federal government, said Rebecca Vigil-Giron, secretary of state in New Mexico and president of the association that represents other secretaries.

"A lot of states do not have good data systems," she acknowledged.

California officials are relying on an older registration computer system but hope to have a new list by 2006 that complies with federal law.

Many state officials acknowledge that their systems and laws need to be tightened. Under Oregon law, for example, outside organizations can hire temporary workers and pay them for each new registration. In Nevada, temporary workers may be paid by the hour but not for individual registrations.

"You are creating incentives for fraud if you pay by the signature," Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury said.

In Alabama, counties have a big backlog of last-minute registrations and discrepancies in the records have left them unsure how many voters are on the rolls. Last week, Anita Tatum, director of the state office of registrations, resigned after she could not explain the discrepancies.

In Ohio, the Republican Party is challenging about 25,000 new registrations. David Beckwith, a GOP spokesman in Ohio, said there were a number of "Democratic front groups" holding registration drives in the region and that "the fraud accusations have been worse than in 40 years."

He said multiple Democratic registration forms were signed in the same hand, Democratic signatures were traded for "cash or crack cocaine," and a woman's husband who died 20 years ago was registered in the Cleveland area.

"This has been sloppy and haphazard," Beckwith said.

America Coming Together, a liberal group formed in 2003 with 300,000 donors, amassed a $125 million budget for registering voters, spokeswoman Sara Leonard said. Much of the money flowed down to local organizations that hired temporary workers. Another liberal group, America Votes, a coalition of 33 organizations led by powerful unions and environmental groups, built up a $400 million budget, part of which went to registrations.

The Republican National Committee funded one company at the center of allegations, Voter Outreach of America Inc., active in Las Vegas and across the nation. It was set up by Nathan Sproul, former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.

Mrasek, who is disabled with emphysema, said he and his son spotted a newspaper ad for the Sproul group. The younger Mrasek, who also is disabled and lives with his father at the Daisy Motel, bowed out when he learned the emphasis was to register GOP voters.

His father took the Sproul job, which paid about $8 an hour and allowed workers to go home early with full pay on days they managed to register 18 Republicans. Mrasek said he was given a written script to ask people whether they favored President Bush or Sen. John Kerry. To those favoring Kerry, Mrasek replied that he was just taking a poll and thanked them for stopping.

He offered to register those who favored Bush. "George Bush really needs your help this election," he said he was told to say.

In predominantly Democratic Las Vegas, however, Mrasek had a hard time finding unregistered Republicans, he said. One day, he registered himself and his son as Republicans to meet his quota, although he opposes Bush's Iraq policies and plans to vote for Kerry.

Eric Russell, another temporary employee for the project, also alleged that he saw Democratic Party registrations thrown in the trash. With legal assistance from the Democratic Party, he went to court and tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen registration.

Russell, a Republican who now plans to vote for Kerry, gave authorities a copy of the written sales pitch, which said, in part: "Use your training to find likely Republicans."

Sproul denied the allegations. He said he fired Russell and then sued him, alleging he and the company had been slandered.

"Our goal was to register as many supporters of President Bush as we could, however we gave very strict instructions to everybody associated with us that we had a zero-tolerance policy if anybody was destroying, tampering or altering registration forms," he said, noting that his project turned in more than 500 Democratic registrations in Nevada.

Adding to the mix, Republicans say some of the Democratic registrations submitted by liberal groups are tainted.

Brian Scroggins, chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, said his organization spot-checked some of the new Democratic registration forms and found that "the first three we looked at" carried home addresses that were vacant lots.

"Sure we're upset," Scroggins said.

However, Sproul also has run into trouble in Oregon, where the secretary of state opened an investigation earlier this month into allegations from three Sproul employees that the organization had destroyed Democratic registrations, a felony.

In West Virginia, Lisa Bragg, a mother of two teenagers who was desperate for a job, decided against working for Sproul after seeing a written sales script that flatly declared: "The goal is to register Republicans."

"It was dishonest," said Bragg, a Democrat. "I didn't want to hide in the bushes and not sign up Democrats."

With so much acrimony among party officials across the country, local elections officials feel the heat.

"Government officials are certainly under the gun," said Lomax, the Clark County registrar. "Nobody wants to be the next Florida. If you are in a swing state like we are and there is a close vote, there will be litigation."