Glimpse Inside the Lies and Cheating Of RNC Operations
Oct. 21, 2004 | Lisa Bragg, a 37-year-old mother of two in St. Albans, W. Va., spotted a newspaper ad last August for a customer-service position offering the pretty good wage of $9 an hour. Bragg, who studied communications in college and talks with the easygoing flair of someone who "really just loves people," called the number and soon found herself in the offices of Kelly Services, the national temp agency, filling out an application. And then, like the other people who'd come in for the job, she discovered that there was something strange afoot.
The people at Kelly were cagey about the nature of the position. They first made the applicants watch workplace-safety videos before divulging that the job had nothing at all to do with customer service. Instead, employees would be conducting a "political survey." At that point, some annoyed applicants walked off. Those who remained were asked to attend "orientation" at the Charleston Civic Center the next day. There, the workers were let in on the big secret: "They said we'd be working for the Republicans," Bragg recalls. "They'd been sneaky all along, so when they said that, you could hear the sighs around the room." The applicants were then handed several documents describing what they would be doing -- and Bragg, a proud Democrat, saw that the entire enterprise was based on deception, and she decided to walk away.
The employment session that Bragg attended that summer afternoon in West Virginia was, it turns out, part of an apparent nationwide voter-registration scheme engineered by Sproul & Associates, an Arizona consulting firm that's been paid more than $600,000 by the Republican National Committee this year.
During the past week and a half, several former employees, elections officials and others across the country who've had dealings with the firm have revealed to various local media outlets Sproul's methods for boosting GOP registration in key swing states. The accounts allege that Sproul's workers were encouraged to lie, cheat and, according to Eric Russell, a former Sproul employee in Las Vegas who first told his story to a local television station last week, even destroy the registration forms of Democrats who'd registered to vote with Sproul canvassers. Sproul has denied those charges, variously challenging the veracity of its former employees; but taken together, the stories are compelling, and they may provide an early glimpse into the kinds of shady tactics Republicans are using to win at the polls this year.
In Bragg's account, workers were asked to congregate outside local convenience stores and pretend to be nonpartisan political pollsters interested in the nuances of local opinion. "If anyone asks what kind of poll [this is], it is a simple field poll to see what neighborhood support is," reads the script Sproul handed Bragg. But if the respondents to this pretend poll said that they were Bush supporters, canvassers were told to offer to help them register to vote. If they said they were Kerry supporters, the canvassers would politely walk away.
Bragg says that fooling people was the key to the job. Canvassers were told to act as if they were nonpartisan, to hide that they were working for the RNC, especially if approached by the media. Bragg's story mirrors the accounts provided to Salon by several librarians across the country who say they were contacted by Sproul in early September. In letters the firm sent to the libraries, Sproul misrepresented itself as America Votes -- a left-leaning national voter registration group not affiliated with Sproul -- but said that it was interested in registering "all those who wish to register to vote." Shortly after Sproul canvassers began working the libraries, though, patrons began complaining that the canvassers were being especially inquisitive about their political leanings, and some were pushing people to register as Republicans.
Pushiness seems to be a common theme in accounts of Sproul's activities. Barbara Nielsen, the clerk of Douglas County, Ore., says that she received a couple of written complaints from local citizens who'd been harassed by Sproul canvassers bent on recruiting people for the GOP. Since many Sproul canvassers were paid for each Republican registration form they handed in but got nothing for Democratic forms, some had an incentive to coerce people to go red, and to be careless about the forms Democrats handed to them. Michael Johnson, a Sproul canvasser in Portland, Ore., told a local TV station there last week that because he wasn't being paid for the Democratic forms he turned in, he "might" sometimes trash them. The revelation prompted Oregon officials to open an investigation into Sproul. |
