The head of a voter registration firm used by the GOP was arrested this weekend following accusations that the firm of tricked thousands of California voters to switch to the Republican party.
Mark Jacoby of the Young Political Majors, or YPM, was charged with voter fraud by registering to vote in 2006 and 2007 in Los Angeles, where he was not a resident, allegedly to meet requirements to gather signatures.
Also of note, as mentioned last week on California Faultline, in 2006 another GOP backed voter registration drive was also accused of fraud.
ACORN’s California registration efforts focused in San Diego
The more infamous voter registration group, ACORN, has also been busy in Southern California.
Of the 39,600 voters ACORN has registered in California, 24,644 have been in San Diego. The embattled group’s state spokesman, Amy Schur, told the San Diego Union Tribune that the focus was there because, “We saw a high percentage of people who were eligible to vote.”
The Union Tribune reports that 17.6 percent of registrations ACORN turned in to local elections offices “were red-flagged for incomplete or invalid information, such as missing signatures or birthdays,” although after review only 7% were considered invalid.
The most alarming figure was that out of 200 local short term employees ACORN hired and trained for their voter registration drive, 75 were fired after it was discovered they had submitted inaccurate registration cards.
Neither the FBI or the Secretary of State’s office would offer comment to the Union Tribune if they were investigating ACORN in San Diego.
The good news for California’s voting integrity
While voter registration drives in California appear to be ripe for bi-partisan fraud, Reuters reports that even with our ink and paper ballots, our voting system may be the best in the nation:
California is deemed the best prepared of the 50 U.S. states for election system problems this year, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and voting watchdog groups.
…photo by Andy Sternberg, used under a Creative Commons license…
