DENVER, Colo. — A firm hired by the Republican Party to run voter registration and get-out-the-vote operations in several states has been fired by the Colorado Republican Party following allegations of fraud.
According to the report from KDVR-TV in Denver, move came at the recommendation of the Republican National Committee, leading to the termination of contracts with Strategic Allied Consulting in seven swing states, following an investigation of voter fraud by the company in Florida.
The move in Colorado comes after a video surfaced on YouTube of a contract employee of Strategic Allied Consulting registering voters outside of a Colorado Springs grocery store admitting that she was trying to only register voters who support Mitt Romney.
“The Colorado Republican Party takes any threat to the voting process very seriously,” said state GOP spokesman Justin Miller. “Following an alleged incident by an employee of Strategic Allied Consultants outside of Colorado we terminated our relationship.”
KDVR reports that already this year, the RNC has funneled more than $3.1 million to the company, just formed in June by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona voting consultant who has run other firms that have been accused of dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats and other improprieties aimed at helping Republican candidates.
Strategic Allied Consulting was hired to do voter registration drives in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada, and had been planning get-out-the-vote drives in Ohio and Wisconsin, Sproul told the Los Angeles Times last Thursday.
Reports from the Federal Election Commission show that Sproul’s other company, Lincoln Strategy Group, has been paid more than $80,000 by the Romney campaign to help register voters between November 2011 and March 2012 during the GOP primary season.
Sproul told the Times he formed Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the RNC for publicity’s sake, given past negative media coverage of Lincoln stemming from past allegations going back to 2004, when employees in Nevada and Oregon signed up Democrats but threw out their forms instead of turning them in.
Sproul has also been linked to signature fraud this election cycle in his home state of Arizona where he was working on a ballot initiative that would allow the state to nullify any federal laws it finds to be unconstitutional.
In Florida, the state GOP fired Strategic Allied Consulting last week after election workers in Palm Beach County discovered numerous registration forms that appeared to be filled out in the same handwriting, some including wrong addresses and birthdays.
On Friday, the Times reported that at least 10 Florida counties have detected fraud in the forms turned in by Sproul’s firm.
Click here for more on this story from KDVR-TV in Denver.
