GOP Halts Paid Voter-Drive Program

The suspension came after election officials in the two counties discovered thousands of flawed registration forms and received complaints from residents who said they had been improperly registered as Republicans.

Officials in both counties have turned over the forms to local prosecutors and contacted the California secretary of state.

The voter registration program, in which the GOP paid private contractors $3 for each new registration submitted, was credited with adding 750,000 Republican registrations to state voter rolls in the last three years.

"It provides us with no benefit to wrongly register voters," said GOP spokesman Hector Barajas, adding that the party would continue to register voters using volunteers.

For three decades, the state Republican and Democratic parties have accused each other of voter registration fraud, said Bruce Cain, director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies.

But the process has evolved since party volunteers collected most of the registration forms.

"When you switched from party activists to paid people, the possibility of carelessness or fraud goes up because they're doing it for a buck," Cain said.

State Democrats also run a so-called bounty program, but pay $4 per registration form only to volunteers affiliated with party clubs or committees, said party Chairman Art Torres.

"There's an inherent problem with using the private sector for the party machine," Torres said.

In Orange County, the allegations center on a subcontractor working for Bader & Associates, a Newport Beach-based signature collection firm run by Thomas Bader.

Contractor Christopher Dinoff appeared to be connected to the 100 or so cases of allegedly improper voter registration that elections officials turned over to the district attorney's office last week, Orange County election officials said. Dinoff did not return calls seeking comment.

About three dozen Orange County Democrats complained that they were signed up as Republicans, and a number of the voter registration forms submitted to the registrar's office had invalid phone numbers and addresses, election officials said.