To hear Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli and other GOP elected officials whine and bloviate about supposed election fraud - the excuse behind all of the GOP efforts to disenfranchise voters - one would think that Mr. Kookinelli would immediately jump up and down and try to spearhead an investigation in the wake the arrest of a campaign official in Virginia for seeking to destroy completed voter registration forms. After all, Kookinelli has shown himself to be only too willing to launch himself into investigating things and people - especially academic types - who don't subscribe to Kookinelli's crazed views. But, oops! There's one tiny problem: the man arrested is a Republican and has ties to the national GOP. That's right, the RNC itself. And what has Cuccinelli done? Nothing to date. An article in Salon looks at the arrest in the context of other GOP voter registration schemes to keep Democrat leaning voters from voting. Here are excerpts:
A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.
“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.
But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.
The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Small was “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”
Some of those questionable applications included address changes for existing voters, such that Florida election officials told the BRAD BLOG they worry voters could find themselves disenfranchised come Election Day. In Florida, as in many states, provisional ballots cast at precincts other than where voters are officially registered will not be counted. So changing the addresses on voter registrations without voters’ knowledge is a serious crime with potentially very serious consequences.
If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it’s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.
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| Colin Small - Arrested for Destroying Voter Registration documents. |
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