Gonzalez Condemns Republican Operative’s Voter Fraud

October 1, 2012 (Washington, DC) – Today, Congressman Charles A. Gonzalez (TX-20), the Ranking Member on the House Subcommittee on Elections, issued the following statement on revelations that Strategic Allied Consulting, a company run by a man named Nathan Sproul that was hired by the Republican National Committee to perform voter registration work in several states, had been caught engaging in suspected voter registration fraud in Florida.

“There is a sad irony that the same people who demand restrictive voter ID and registration laws to prevent fraud they cannot find would hire a man known to engage in questionable voter registration practices and then fall silent when he is suspected of repeating those unacceptable practices,” said Ranking Member Gonzalez. “While I was pleased to see that the discovery of these abuses ended Mr. Sproul’s business with the Republican Party of Florida, that is not enough. I hope that the Republican National Committee, its Chairman, and the Romney campaign are all working right now to end their affiliations with Mr. Sproul and his associates and assure that there is no repetition of such acts. Too many men and women have given their sweat, blood, and their very lives to protect our constitutionally guaranteed right to vote for any political party to be affiliated with people trying to deny American citizens that right.”

Mr. Sproul has a long history of voter suppression dating back years, including the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. He has been associated with submitting fraudulent ballots before. His companies have illegally thrown out the paperwork of people who tried to register as Democrats.

So notorious was Sproul that, he told the Los Angeles Times, “In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet”. He’d done the same in 2008. The Republican National Committee and Romney campaign knew of Sproul’s reputation and his past practices, yet they have paid him more than $3 million over the course of this campaign. While the RNC claims that it has severed its ties to Sproul’s operations in Florida in light of the revelations of crimes, it is not clear that the same has occurred with Sproul operations in Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, or Virginia, nor its planned operations in Ohio and Wisconsin.

Histories of Sproul’s misdeeds have been compiled by: www.RepublicReport.org and Salon.com.