Signs of Voter Fraud Appear
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 drunks 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," Mrasek 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, liberal and conservative organizations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to register voters. The crush, along with the irregular registrations, have bred chaos across the nation.
"We were getting stacks of forms with identical handwriting," said Harvard L. Lomax, registrar of voters in 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 ensure that registration lists were more accurate and current. Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, requiring every state to have a computerized statewide registration list that would be instantly updated with each new registration.
