We established yesterday that Michele Reagan is having a really bad week. it continues today with another report in the Arizona Republic, Elections changes roil key state race:
The Legislature reworked election laws last year before, in the face of a citizen referendum, backing down amid charges its work had amounted to voter suppression.
This year, the candidates for secretary of state are reopening the bruising debate.
State Sen. Michele Reagan, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, said she will, if elected, champion parts of the controversial law, such as changes that would allow elections officials to remove voters from the permanent early-voting list and to ban mass ballot collection.
Those were two pieces of House Bill 2305, which the Legislature passed in the waning hours of its 2013 session, as supporters said it was needed to keep elections running smoothly.
Her opponent, Democrat Terry Goddard, said Reagan can’t have it both ways by saying she supports some parts of the legislation but dislikes others. The bill required an up-or-down vote, and Reagan voted “yes” with the majority Republicans, he said.
“You can’t separate your portions from the bill you said you voted to support,” Goddard said last week during a meeting with The Arizona Republic’s editorial board.
After lawmakers’ 2013 vote, a coalition ranging from Latinos to Libertarians to animal-rights supporters quickly formed to halt the bill from becoming law and refer it to this fall’s ballot.
The coalition gathered more than 146,000 signatures in less than three months, sending the question to voters.
In February, the Legislature repealed the bill, canceling the need for a referendum. Reagan voted with the majority to undo the very bill lawmakers had passed months earlier.
She defends her votes, saying it was worth it to support the wide-ranging bill because it contained measures she had authored. After the pushback, she said it was important to listen to the public and vote for repeal.
Riiight, listen to the voters, which Ms. Voter Suppression did not do in either drafting the bill and voting for HB 2305. The GOP Voter Suppression Act, HB 2305, was repealed for one reason, and one reason only: the citizens referendum (“citizens veto”) on the ballot would motivate Democratic voters to turnout to vote in a midterm election. So in a way, repeal of HB 2305 also suppressed voter turnout.
When the Tea-Publicans in the Arizona legislature repealed HB 2305 for this reason, you were warned at the time that it was all just a ruse. Oh, they all swore up and down that they would not reintroduce pieces of HB 2305 during the last legislative session. But as Ms. Voter Suppression has been very clear in stating out on the campaign stump, if elected she will be pursuing her GOP Voter suppression Act again January. Don’t giver her the chance.
Right at the end of this report, there was this ironic statement from the GOP’s voter suppression specialist, Nathan Sproul:
Republican strategist Nathan Sproul said Reagan is tapping into voter anxiety that elections aren’t secure.
“I think this could be a defining issue in the race,” he said. “People understand people tampering with the ballot.”
I would really love to know if he said that with a straight face. Sproul would know all about “tampering.” It was just a couple of weeks ago I posted that Another arrest made in Nathan Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consultants voter fraud scandal in Florida. As I said at the time, “The thing that really pisses me off is how political reporters in this state continue to ask this sleazeball his opinions on campaigns he is associated with as if he is legitimate, and always fail to mention his long rap sheet of voter fraud allegations. True investigative reporters would be taking this guy down for his illegal activities.”
The Bradblog reports today, GOP Operative Threatens BRAD BLOG With Legal Action After FL Probe Confirms Our 2012 Reports on Deceptive Voter Registration Scheme, Fraud:
Well, this is an interesting turn of events. It includes a bizarre twist that even we would not have foreseen, involving a Republican operative who is now threatening legal action against us for reporting (accurately) on his companies’ relationship to voter registration fraud and deceptive voter registration practices during the 2012 election and in previous cycles.
Remember that massive, multi-state GOP voter registration fraud scandal just before the 2012 election? The one that started in Palm Beach, Florida, spread to several different counties, then several different states? The scandal resulted in the Republican National Committee firing the Arizona firm they had secretly hired for millions of dollars to carry out voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in a bunch of key swing-states, including Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado in advance of the Presidential Election.
The firm at the center of the RNC scandal was named Strategic Allied Consulting. It was created and run by Nathan Sproul, a notorious Arizona-based Republican operative with a checkered past, who ran Republican voter registration drives and other on-the-ground GOP activist campaigns. Sproul’s name was not used in the legal filings which created Strategic Allied Consulting in advance of the 2012 election, due to his various companies facing voter registration fraud allegations and criminal investigations in a number of states going back as far as the 2004 Presidential election. Because of that unfairly tarnished background, Sproul claimed when the 2012 scandal first surfaced, the RNC didn’t want his fingerprints on the operation. The RNC was dodgy about the issue, but fired Sproul and his firm in several states once the scandal came to light, despite having paid millions of dollars for the effort.
The BRAD BLOG broke a number of stories related to the RNC scandal at the time, including details on the very first reports of “hundreds” of fraudulent registration forms turned in to the Palm Beach County, FL Supervisor of Elections after they were collected by Sproul’s workers and turned in by the local Republican Party.
In the same series of articles, we also exposed the deceptive (and perhaps illegal) registration scheme employed by Sproul’s firms in states where they operated. The scheme involved registration workers trained to pretend to be pollsters asking voters who they planned to support in the Presidential election. If they answered the question correctly (Romney) Sproul’s workers would help them register to vote. If the unsuspecting citizen answered the “survey” question incorrectly (Obama), the workers would wish them a nice day, and then move on to the next target.
As we documented with video, email and other records at the time, including admissions by Sproul himself, his firm used this same deceptive tactic in state after state and in a number of recent election cycles.
Now, a two-year Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) investigation has finally wrapped up into the 2012 allegations in that state. It has led to yet another arrest of one of Sproul’s workers, found no evidence of conspiracy by the company in that state, confirmed The BRAD BLOG’s reporting on their deceptive registration technique, and sent Sproul scurrying to threaten us via email (posted below) with a lawsuit…for something…
Now if only The Republic reporters would provide this context whenever they so lazily seek a quote from Nathan Sproul, the GOP’s voter suppression specialist.