Mitt Romney Hires Voter Disenfranchisement Firm

Mitt Romney is famously enthusiastic about firing people who do a poor job delivering services to him. Among the most important service providers are American voters, whose job it is to deliver electoral mandates to Republican politicians so the latter can cut taxes and handout college scholarships to fetuses. (Valid while in the womb only.)

But sometimes, voters fall down on the job by registering as Democrats. Which leaves Romney little choice but to fire them.

To that end, the Romney campaign has hired Nathan Sproul, a Republican operative with a long history of destroying Democratic registration forms. Hired by the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign to perform voter registration work, Sproul's firm boosted Republican enrollment in Oregon and Nevada by failing to submit Democratic registration forms to the Boards of Election. During the 2006 midterm elections, Wal-Mart banned Sproul's "for partisan voter registration efforts in Tennessee" after  the Republican National Committee had hired the firm.

Sproul's performance highlights a key difference between fraud perpetuated by ACORN-affiliated registration drives and those associated with GOP enrollment initiatives: Right wing voter fraud is just more competent. ACORN submitted illegitimate signatures from people who didn't exist and therefore would never cast votes, which defrauded ACORN itself (they paid their canvassers by the signature) but made no difference to electoral process. By failing to submit all registration forms, Sproul actually disenfranchised legal voters.

According to FEC reports, Sproul's consulting agency, the Lincoln Strategy Group, has received about $71,391 in payments from the Romney for President Inc. committee from November 30th through March 2nd of this year, but even if firing unworthy registrants is an effective campaign tool, you wonder why Romney would go to such lengths.

After all, Democrat, Republican or independent, the overwhelming majority of ballots in 2012 will be cast on electronic voting machines. If push comes to shove, would those machines really vote against their favorite cousin?

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