Posted on 10/18/2004 6:37:00 PM PDT by knak
STOCKTON -- Voter registration collectors backed by partisan dollars in the fierce battle to register voters in San Joaquin County have returned more fraudulent registrations ahead of today's close of registration than ever before, elections officials said.
More than 100 suspicious registration cards were mailed this month to state investigators, and some 2,000 more remain in boxes at the county elections office, Registrar of Voters Deborah Hench said.
Hench said dead Republicans this year have been registered to vote Democrat, Democrats have been registered on cards pre-marked Republican, and registrations have been fabricated altogether.
Almost all were submitted by workers or so-called bounty hunters paid to collect registration cards on street corners and outside welfare offices and retail stores, a practice that has swelled the number of registered voters in the county by more than 20,000 since March.
Hench said last week some fraudulent registration cards undoubtedly have not been caught and discarded before being entered in the county's registration roll.
"In a close race, it matters," said Bill Arno, vice president of Sacramento-based Arno Political Consultants. "In a close city council race, in a close county supervisor race, in the close races, in the little stuff, it can matter."
Fraudulent registrations affect the drawing of precincts and degrade confidence in the administration of elections, even though such registrations rarely are used to vote twice, said Michael Alvarez, a professor at California Institute of Technology who has studied voter fraud across the state.
James Marsh, of Stockton said he figured when he received a yellow county envelope in the mail in August that it was a jury summons. Instead, he found he had been registered to vote under a bogus Social Security number and an altered name.
"I took it as an insult," Marsh said.
Professor Bob Benedetti is executive director of the University of the Pacific's Jacoby Center for Regional and Community Studies. Benedetti said immigration and migration between counties makes California a more competitive registration ground than states where residents tend to stay put.
"The real story in all of this is the professionalization of politics," he said. "Being able to control a block of voters is power."
Hench said eliminating the bounty paid for registrations would curb fraud. Arno said fraud is an unwelcome part of all business and its occurrence is miniscule compared with the overall volume of good registrations returned.
There were 269,387 registered voters at last count Friday, up from 248,786 in March, Hench reported.
Comparatively, the state annually opened investigations on some 100 to 250 fraud cases across the state between 1994 and 2002, said Alvarez, who compiled data from the investigations arm of the office of Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.
"There really doesn't seem to be a huge amount of elections fraud, at least in terms of the number of cases," he said.
There were some 60 voter fraud convictions in the state between 1994 and 2002, 55 percent of which regarded voter registration, he said.
In San Joaquin County, Bonnie Rae Fetters, 47, pleaded guilty this month to a misdemeanor count of registering a fictitious person. She said earlier this year that she traded dollar bills and packages of Doral menthol cigarettes for voter registrations.
Before that, Rhonda Kenya Felix pleaded guilty in March to a misdemeanor charge of forging six registration cards in 2001.
How can a homeless person register in a precinct when they have no address to confirm?
When they start sending people to jail then I'll start to believe they're taking it seriously.
Excuses, excuses.
"Not very many" is an acceptable level of fraud?
I think that the Republicans should challenge the California vote, and require that all votes cast be challenged to see if the voter is a Citizen as the California Constitution requires.
bookmark bump
Hiring someone to gather voter registrations should be a felony.
Eliminate voter bounty now and prosecute those who pursue this practice. Stiff penalties and prison time at the very least, plus make it a federal crime so that the people doing it can never vote again!
You'd think with the rampant fraud going on it would be in the Republican's interests to get this fixed.
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