The head of a firm which was paid some $50,000 by the Republican Party in Sacramento to sign up new Republican voters this year has “an extensive criminal history, including a prison sentence for stealing from a family she befriended and buying a van with funds stolen from a youth agency.”
Moreover, one of the employees that “professional con-artist” Monica Harris, the head of the GOP’s Momentum Political Services, hired to work with her at the firm, where she was paid per Republican registration, recently pleaded guilty to fraud charges in a multimillion-dollar mortgage scheme.
The growing scandal, all but ignored by those on the Right who professionally pretend that Democrats and ACORN are stealing elections, underscores yet again the extent to which the Republican Party is willing to go in order to win elections, even while falsely accusing Democrats of undermining them…
The new information on Harris and Momentum Political Services comes from a report this week from the Sacramento Bee:
The owner of Momentum Political Services, Monica Harris, has an extensive criminal history, including a prison sentence for stealing from a family she befriended and buying a van with funds stolen from a youth agency, court records show. Two of her victims called Harris a “professional con artist.”
Harris’ employee, Remy Heng, recently pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Sacramento to his role in a multimillion-dollar mortgage fraud scheme in Northern California.
…
Momentum Political Services was hired by the Republican Party of Sacramento County to conduct voter registration drives. [Sacramento County Registrar of Voters Jill] LaVine said her office found numerous examples of people of having their political party affiliation switched to Republican against their wishes.
We detailed the allegations against Momentum Political Services as they emerged earlier this month, and as Sacramento Registrar Jill Lavine turned over some 7,500 registration forms her office determined to be fraudulent over to the Sec. of State’s Election Fraud Unit for investigation.
As we noted at the time, the GOP voter registration were turned in to the Sacramento Registrar’s office “with fake addresses, voter names that don’t exist, duplicate Social Security numbers, and party affiliations that seem to have been changed ‘by someone’ to Republican.”
A few days later we interviewed Lavine on our KPFK radio program. She confirmed the invalid registrations reportedly turned in by the GOP-hired firm.
At the heart of this scandal — other than the extraordinary hypocrisy of the GOP inaccurately accusing Democrats of “voter fraud” while carrying out, and paying top dollar for extensive registration fraud schemes year after year after year — is the “bounty” system used by Republican Party to gather Republican-only voter registrations at the price of anywhere from $5 to $12 for each.
The practice remains legal in California, but has continuously led to GOP election fraud by folks with criminal backgrounds hired again and again by the Republican Party. Every time, details emerge about Democratic forms being shredded, false names being submitted to registrars, and party affiliations fraudulently being changed from Democratic to Republican. If the Democratic Party is doing anything similar in this state — or any other — we’ve not heard about it, even as the Republican Party had long criticized ACORN for paying workers on a “per registration” basis (they didn’t, but it didn’t stop the GOP’s professional anti-ACORN clowns and profiteers like Matthew Vadum from falsely accusing them of doing that and much worse.
The GOP, meanwhile, has been found to do this in election after election, as we detailed in our original report, and as we highlighted while appearing on Fox “News” in September of 2008, just before that year’s Presidential Election. On the day of that Fox appearance, Mark Anthony Jacoby — head of Young Political Majors, the firm hired by the California State Republican Party that year to carry out their voter registration headhunt — was arrested on voter registration charges (he would eventually plead guilty.)
When asked about the scandal, Jeffy Wyly, the campaign manager for incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. (and former state Attorney General) Dan Lungren — who is running this year in a new swing district where Momentum Political Services was gathering Republican registrations — called the matter “unfortunate,” according to Felicia Mello at Elk Grove Patch.
He explained that registration bounties are “a huge part of politics here in California,” but claimed that the effort, paid for by his party, to sign up new Republican voters in his candidate’s district, “was not being run by the campaign.”
Contrast that response to the attacks on ACORN which, unlike the GOP-hired firms founds to have committed fraud each election year, was neither hired by the Democratic Party nor limited their registration gathering to any particular party.
“The third-party firms really need to do their homework,” Wyly told the Patch. “Certainly they need to do a better job of verifying signatures before they submit them to the county.”
Once again, contrast that with ACORN which verified each and every signature, flagging the ones they believed to be fraudulent before turning them in, as required by law, to election officials along with the names of those few workers who they believed had defrauded the organization by creating fake registrations.
When Republicans actually pay for the fraudulent activity it’s “unfortunate” but has nothing to do with the candidates from the party who paid for it. When a tiny handful of ACORN’s tens of thousands of registration workers did the same thing, it was one of the “greatest frauds in voter history in this country” and “destroying the fabric of democracy,” as then GOP Presidential nominee John McCain actually charged during a Presidential debate in 2008. That was just two years after the same McCain had been the keynote speaker at an ACORN rally, where he told those in attendance that they were “what makes America special.”
In commenting on the woman at the center of the latest GOP voter registration fraud scandal this week, Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter opined: “Harris’s long history of criminal activity should have precluded her from getting any contract registering voters, but clearly Republicans don’t care about voter registration fraud if they think it’s going to benefit them.”
She is correct. The history of GOP voter registration fraud, as we detailed in our previous report on the scandal, dwarfs anything that ACORN — the non-partisan community organization which legally registered millions of low and middle-income voters, no matter their party affiliation — was ever falsely accused of.
McCarter goes on to write: “Instead of going after these political consulting firms and the bounty system that pays them, Republican legislatures across the country are punishing actual, legitimate, registered voters. Because that’s how they’ll win.”
Yup. We’ve been reporting for months now — years actually — on how the false claims against ACORN were used to buttress the GOP’s cynical and deceptive assault on voting rights to support polling place Photo ID restrictions meant only to keep legal Democratic-leaning voters from voting. Such laws, of course, do nothing to prevent voter registration fraud, which is already a violation of the law and deterred by the federal requirement in the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) to show Photo ID when voting for the first time after one has been registered to vote by mail or by a third party. Since the passage of those Republican laws in more than a dozen states over the past year, long-time voters have been disenfranchised, even as they continue to fight like hell to see their voting rights restored. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for just a few of our recent examples.)
As usual, Democrats are doing little to nothing about these laws — which are created by the GOP for a fictional reason, based on fictional evidence to suggest that the very real disenfranchising laws are needed — other than crossing their fingers, hoping that non-governmental organizations like the NAACP and the League of Women Voters and others step in to help, and otherwise, preparing to feign outrage when they next get screwed at the polls by Republicans who have a long history of proving they are willing to do anything to win — legally or otherwise.
Slimeball O’Keefe lies again.
‘Non-Citizen’ Voter In James O’Keefe’s Voter Fraud Video Is Actually A Citizen
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/05/15/484462/james-o-keefe-voter-fraud-north-carolina/?mobile=nc
Second ‘Non-Citizen’ In James O’Keefe Voter Fraud Video Naturalized In 2011
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/05/16/485008/james-o-keefe-second-citizen/?mobile=nc
Somewhat OT, and mind you I have a gay nephew… my partner just came up with a dandy…”It’s only Okay for priests. ” Hope it don’t steal no Joe thunder, but just had to pass along. Hypocricy,…which one should be plain as day! That would not be Joe I’m talking about , but homophobes and secret religious allowance… when the pope wrote the cannon law to hide the shit! Keep dissecting and talking! 🙂 Real religion is in your heart, not the deceiver of your over loaded head.
To be totally honest, I think “the gay” has been used for years by other governments to bribe our own. And sorry, this is pretty out of place. But Hey… had to.
Well, my point is how does democracy and secret vote counting jive for all who genuinely feel moved in their hearts?????????????????
Especially when you have jerks like that, that become integral to the counting, or real numbers ???
Just who really is guilty of fraud and antidemocracy?????
George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott made his fortune off of Hitler as a banker, opposed the US fighting WW2, and continued to help Hitler during WW2 against his countrymen.
Conservatives fought for the destroying AMERICUH in the Civil War for forunes.
All conservatives have integrity, honor, and love AMERICUH!
Those are Conservative family values.
Just like their ancestors the Roman conservative family values put the community organizer Jesus who stood up to the banks in the churches on the cross.
Those who do not study history (or math or chemistry or english or anything hard) are doomed to be conservatives.
Oh God. Dan Lungren again. Sigh.
My favorite story about this clown…it takes a bit of backstory to explain his connection so bear with me:
Many, many years ago there was this political war between the sheriff of Sacramento County California and police chief Eugene Byrd in the little town of Isleton (pop.900ish). The sheriff was selling gun carry permits for campaign contributions (google the words: colafrancesco papers bribery). Byrd on the other hand inherited a police department whose normal revenue stream was a speed trap. Byrd thought of a very different income source: at that time (prior to 1996 I think it was) a police chief could issue a gun carry permit to anybody in the county. So he set up a county-wide training system and ended up issuing 1,500 permits charging $150 a pop – financed the entire Isleton PD. Hey, it made more sense than a speed trap and not one of those people ever screwed up with a gun. The sheriff’s pool of only about 300 permitholders on the other hand…well go read the Colafrancesco police report :(. Telling people they’re “politically connected and special” while giving them gun carry rights and an “honorary” *badge* is idiocy.
Enter Dan Lungren – the state AG, who at the sheriff’s requests launches a series of investigations, harrassment and illegality at Chief Byrd in Isleton in support of his good buddy the thoroughly corrupt sheriff.
Flash forward to 1998. Lungren ran for governor (that California office now known forever as “governator”) against Gray Davis. The NRA headquarters in Fairfax VA told the California NRA chapters to support Lungren – not over guns, but because NRA HQ was infested with “Christian Conservatives” who cared more about the abortion issue than either guns OR corruption.
The California NRA guys revolted against Fairfax and managed to get that element cleaned out back at HQ. Lungren lost by a slim enough margin that the “gun vote” was probably a factor.
But the bastard is still out doing annoying stuff like this…sigh.
Oh, and Byrd is long since retired so go slow through Isleton, the speed trap is back :(.
@Ancient. Your off-topic and often nonsensical serial posting gets tiresome after a while. How about exercising a little self control, or if that is not possible, go over and post gibberish on the Huffington Post, where it will fit right in…
This is kiddie stuff compared to what the San Diego crew has done in the past.
Strider. Fairlight.
One has to wonder if Strider is still the Treasurer of the California GOP. Strider would have to approve these “purchases.”
I only started reading this blog last spring when all those (lost? overlooked? suddenly manufactured?) votes turned up for Prosser in Waukesha. I have found it eye-opening, to put it mildly, and there’s still a lot of details about the mechanics of the whole registering/voting/counting process that surprise me when I see them here.
In this article, I was amazed at the idea that there were “duplicate social security numbers…” turned in with some of these fraudulent registrations. Is it usual to have to give a social security number to register to vote? Does that happen in every state? I can’t remember ever having to give it. (I know this isn’t the main point of this article, but if anyone has further info about it I am sure curious.) Thanks
I know you have been missing my comments Brad. Looks like this one took lessons from ACORN. Can you post the documents from this investigation? Has this person been charged? What are the charges? I totally agree that no matter what the party he is with that he should be prosecuted for this. This is why we need Voter ID! Too much distrust of the voting process. Voter ID will alleivate some of this…but not all. Unfortunatly, there are people who will always commit fraud to for personal gain.
Mary McLaurin @13 wrote3:
Mary: You are sadly misinformed, both about ACORN and photo ID.
The fraud in this instance is “registration fraud.” It cannot be prevented by polling place photo ID.
The only form of “voter fraud” that can be prevented by polling place photo ID laws is in person voter impersonation — a form of voter fraud that is virtually non-existent.
ACORN, as an organization, did not engage in registration fraud. Some signature gatherers sought to defraud ACORN by turning in bogus registrations. When that happened, ACORN reported the fraud and flagged the the invalid forms for the appropriate election officials.
Scores of both federal and state investigations failed to establish so much as a single vote ever cast as the result of any fraudulent registration form turned in by ACORN.
Randy D, don’t get trapped in your own thinking. Your welcome to your opinions and ways and I am welcome to my own, like water off a ducks back. Too bad more people don’t watch listen and learn from nature…she truly is our closest link to the creator. And by the way, I don’t read huffpo.