Sandoval will be the honorary chairman of Team Nevada, the joint effort by Republican campaigns, Sandoval confirmed on Thursday night.
"I will continue to do all I can to elect Republicans," Sandoval said. The governor's new role with the Republican campaigns was first reported by Jon Ralston this week.
Sandoval urged a room of about 100 people in Reno on Thursday night to volunteer.
"We have momentum. It's a dead heat right now," he said before the debate between Rep. Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden. "It will take all of us knocking on doors."
Team Nevada and Sandoval's political adviser, Mike Slanker, would not confirm the governor's role on Friday or explain how he would be utilized by the campaign.
Sandoval spoke in Tampa, Fla., at the Republican National Convention and has helped GOP candidates raise money. But Sandoval, who endorsed Texas Gov. Rick Perry early in the Republican presidential nomination process, has not taken a highly visible role as a surrogate Mitt Romney. He has also distanced himself from the Nevada Republican Party, which has been taken over by backers of Rep. Ron Paul. That fracture was what prompted the campaigns to form Team Nevada as the primary campaign function.
As is often the case with Team Nevada, this looks to be (yet another) case of them rushing to the media to save face. With only a week left until early voting begins and 25 days left until "Official Election Day", what can Brian Sandoval do now for Team Nevada? Oh yes, he can help them spin the media away from their voter registration fraud scandal, and from their complete failure in keeping up with Nevada Democrats in the field.
Still, that can only help Team Nevada so much. As Jon Ralston explained yesterday, the actual scene for Nevada Republicans may be worse than what we see now in the bulk of the public polls. They're in a real bind now, and there's not much left for them to do.
So of course, Team Nevada operatives rope Governor Sandoval into making a few more public appearances with them. But really, don't be fooled by the spin. If Sandoval really felt good about Romney's chances here, he would have done more for him earlier. And if Team Nevada were really in such a great position to rescue Romney and Dean Heller, they wouldn't be making such desperate moves now.
I've said this before, but I truly feel compelled to say this again. This Nathan Sproul fiasco truly exposes the hypocrisy of the now "TEA" fueled Nevada Republican Party. How? Let me... No, wait, I'll first let Desert Beacon explain. She reminded us this morning of just who was crying "FRAUD!!!" in Carson City last year.
None of these ALEC inspired [voter suppression] bills passed. Interesting… they all seem to have been sponsored by white Republicans…
Fortunately, none of those bills passed last session. However, we just can't expect ALEC & its teabagger followers to relentlessly on this. They may very well reintroduce their voter suppression "model bills" again next year.
And strangely enough, they may use this latest scandal as "reason to act". However, we should remember why this argument doesn't fly. One is that the county election departments and Secretary of State's office can easily detect and combat this kind of fraud already, just as they are doing now. There's simply no need to scare real, legitimate voters away from the polls.
The other reason should be obvious. If these "tea party" Republicans really care about "fighting fraud", why won't they demand that their own party quit encouraging fraud? Seriously, they need to clean their own stinky house before they grandstand in Carson City and in front of TV cameras on their "important efforts to fight fraud!"
And this brings me to the other Nevada Republican who should really know better. Remember that none other than Dean Heller served 12 years as Nevada Secretary of State. Above all others, he should know and care about matters of election integrity. And especially since Dean Heller has been trying so hard to make "ethics" such a central issue in his US Senate reelection campaign, one would think Heller would hold his own party and his own campaign to the highest of ethical standards.
Yet despite all his lofty rhetoric, Dean Heller did absolutely nothing to halt the blatantly unethical and potentially criminal acts coming from the very Team Nevada that's been doing field for him. Perhaps Brad Blog best describes Republicans' use of insidious tactics (even the "not so illegal" ones) to try to gain an edge in "voter registration".
While it's one thing to target your registration drives to areas which may be more friendly to your party --- college campuses or African-American communities for Democrats, evangelical communities and gun shows for Republicans --- it seems quite another thing entirely to systematically instruct registration workers to misrepresent themselves and lie about what they are doing, in order to filter out potential supporters of a party other than the one they are working for.
Our investigation to date suggests this practice is not just systematic, but may even be at the core of the registration strategy for the Republican Party and the Romney campaign. While it's only slightly less appalling than destroying Democratic registration forms, or changing voter addresses so that they will be disenfranchised come Election Day, it certainly seems as if it ought to be as illegal as it is clearly unethical and even unAmerican.
If it's not illegal already in every state in the union, it damned well seems that it should be.
And yet, "Team Nevada" Republicans have resumed using these tactics. And just before they were shamed into dropping the company that pioneered and mastered these tactics, they were outsourcing "voter registration" to this company. And "Team Nevada" Republicans are working the field for Mitt Romney... And for Dean Heller. Remember this next time Dean Heller tries to lecture anyone on "ethics".
Hypocrisy, thy home is in the Nevada Republican Party.
On Monday, we found out that the Nathan Sproul/RNC voter registration fraud scandal had spread to Southern Nevada. Yesterday, both Team Nevada and the Clark County Election Department were hoping there's nothing more to see here.
The problem for them is that there's actually plenty more to see... And to investigate.
Nathan Sproul is now facing criminal investigation in Florida over reports of voter registration fraud. And so far, it looks like there's also potential for one here.
However, there's even more to this story. Brad Blog noted one aspect of Sproul's operation that caught fire... Yet is not being investigated.
In Florida, where the focus has been on the apparently fraudulent registration forms submitted around the state with changed addresses that could result in disenfranchised voters on November 6th, the Los Angeles Times interviewed the man who Strategic Allied has fingered as the worker who submitted the initial batch in question in Palm Beach County.
50-year old William T. Hazard of Boynton Beach maintains his innocence and says he never forged applications or even "wrote on any of the forms he collected." He says he left the firm over a pay dispute two weeks ago. Strategic Allied says the man was fired.
In any event, while saying he "did nothing wrong," he explained to the Times that he answered a Craigslist ad by a company called PinPoint Staffing seeking registered Republicans to do "voter surveys" for $12/hour.
"His only instructions," the paper reports, "were to approach people and ask whom they supported in the presidential election. When people answered with President Obama, he said, he wished them a good day. If someone said Mitt Romney, he asked if they were registered to vote. If not, he handed them forms to fill out."
He added that he was "expected to register Republicans."
Once again, it's the same ruse about taking a poll, rather than signing up folks to vote, in a fourth Strategic Allied state. That amounts to verified reports of the very same deceptive strategy used by registration workers in four of the five states where Sproul's company was working as the RNC's only voter registration outfit.
This pretty much matches what was documented in the viral video out of Colorado... As well as what's been happening right here in Nevada. And apparently, it's spread beyond Nathan Sproul. Incidents like these are being reported across the country. Yet because Nevada Revised Statutes and other state laws are often vague on what passes as legitimate voter registration and what doesn't, Republicans have jumped to operate in this "legal gray area" and misrepresent their voter registration program as a "poll".
I've recently heard reports from the ground on Team Nevada (the RNC approved "Shadow GOP") resuming its voter registration program. Apparently, it's just rehiring directly workers who had previously been on contract with Nathan Sproul. And yes, they're still hiding voter registration forms under their "Quick Poll: Romney or Obama?!" So if you see this at your local DMV some time in the next 72 hours, you can't say I didn't warn you.
Honestly, I may have "misunderestimated" the grave danger behind this video that we found on Tuesday.
Believe it or not, there's more to this story... And BradBlog has been continuing to dig into it. Apparently, Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee have hired none other than Nathan Sproul and his company, Strategic Allied Consulting, to do "voter registration". Sproul's company is known to handle "voter registration" for Republicans in Colorado, and in other swing states. And it turns out that Nathan Sproul has quite the history when it comes to "voter registration".
Brad Friedman has put up a history of Sproul’s companies, and their work for Republican interests. They range from antics like gathering signatures to put Nader on the ballot and being banned from Walmart for partisan voting drives to more serious offenses, like allegedly destroying Democratic registration forms in several states while on the payroll of the RNC. [...]
In 2004, a voter registration worker in Nevada hired by Sproul’s firm told reporters that he had witnessed his surpervisors chucking registration forms signed by Democrats. “They were thrown away in the trash,” he claimed. Sproul’s canvassers in Oregon confessed to doing the same thing, and other reports emerged across several swing states. In Minnesota, workers said they were actually fired for bringing in registration forms signed by Democrats. CBS News obtained faxes showing that Sproul's firm had even impersonated the left-leaning America Votes! to organize voter registration drives at libraries.
Oh yes, that's right. Sproul has a history here in Nevada. And it looks like he's back for more!
Strategic Allied Consulting recently put up a proxy to hide the fact that its website was registered by Sproul; but not before Flynn took a screen shot. Flynn notes that the firm has been aggressively hiring in Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia and Florida. He flagged two large payments to the firm from GOP committees in Florida and North Carolina.
This brings me back to what happened at the Henderson DMV last Friday. There, I saw Shadow GOP Team Nevada staff barking "Quick Poll: Romney or Obama!" at people while hiding voter registration forms under a tally sheet. Funny enough, they were deploying the same tactics as the young woman in Colorado... Except that they weren't stupid enough to claim they were working for the Clark County Election Department.
But is there more to Team Nevada's "voter registration project" than what we've seen in public? What's happening behind the scenes? And if Nathan Sproul has indeed returned to Nevada (as his recent hiring spree suggests), is he engaging in the same kind of fraudulent activities that nearly jeopardized Nevada Republicans in 2004?
We've already been catching a glimpse of suspicious activity in Colorado. And now, the Palm Beach County, Florida, election supervisor is asking her state to investigate fraudulent voter registration forms given to her office by the Florida Republican Party (which hired Nathan Sproul to handle "voter registration"). Might this be happening (again) here in Nevada?
2:45 PM UPDATE: MSNBC's First Read reported earlier today that the RNC announced it's cutting ties to Nathan Sproul. However, First Read also noted this.
Sproul, who runs both Strategic Allied Consulting and Lincoln Strategy, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from NBC News. Besides Florida, the firm has been hired to register GOP voters in Nevada, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia. In Nevada, the RNC was paying the firm directly; in the other four states, the firm was being paid by state parties with the funds reimbursed by the RNC.
So indeed, Team Nevada was using Nathan Sproul. That explains the strange tactics they've been using at the DMV.
Oh, and First Read also provided an update on the Florida investigation.
Christine Weiss, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach State Attorney's Office, told NBC News Thursday that the alleged voter fraud by a Strategic Allied Consulting employee is "currently being investigated" by prosecutors in her office after it was brought to the attention of prosecutors on MondaybyPalm Beach election supervisor Susan Bucher.
Paul Lux, the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections, and a Republican, said that an employee of the firm had dropped off suspected fraudulent registration forms with his office for both Okaloosa County and nearby Santa Rosa County. Some of the Santa Rosa County new registrants appeared to be dead people, he said.
“It’s kind of ironic that the dead people they accused ACORN of registering are now being done by the RPOF” [Republican Party of Florida], said Lux.
Out of 304 Republican voter-registration forms recently dropped off by a firm employee at a small "satellite office" of the Palm Beach elections office, 106 were flagged as potentially fraudulent -- including "a lot" with "similar looking" signatures and others with apparently phony addresses, Bucher said in an interview.
Among the suspect home addresses were those that matched a gas station in Miami, a medical building in Boca Raton and a Land Rover dealership elsewhere in South Florida, she told NBC News.
Indeed, it's ironic. The G-O-TEA forces always cry about "voter fraud", yet it increasingly looks like they are actually the ones who are committing fraud!
