Just when you think democrats can't get any more depraved...

Kind of makes you long for the quiet dignity of the Clinton scandals.


Voter fraud case traced to Defiance County registrations volunteer
124 registrations falsified, allegedly for crack cocaine

By JOE MAHR
BLADE STAFF WRITER


Mary Poppins. Jeffrey Dahmer. Janet Jackson. Chad Staton.
Defiance County elections officials were confident the first three
hadn't moved to their small community. But the fourth one lived there,
and - in exchange for crack cocaine - tried to falsely submit the
first three names and more than 100 others onto the county's voter
registration rolls, police said.

Now Mr. Staton, 22, of Defiance, faces a felony charge of false
registration in a case that has quickly gained national attention as
part of a hotly contested presidential battle that's attracted a
flurry of new voter registrations across the country - and a flurry of
complaints of voter registration fraud.

Defiance County Sheriff David Westrick said that Mr. Staton was
working on behalf of a Toledo woman, Georgianne Pitts, to register new
voters. She, in turn, was working on behalf of the NAACP National
Voter Fund, which was formed by the NAACP in 2000 to register new
voters.

Sheriff Westrick said that Pitts, 41, of Toledo, admitted she gave Mr.
Staton crack cocaine in lieu of cash for supplying her with completed
voter registration forms. The sheriff declined to say how much crack
cocaine Pitts supplied Mr. Staton, or to say whether Pitts knew that
the forms Mr. Staton gave her were falsified.

"That remains under investigation," he said.

Defiance County sheriff's deputies and Toledo police searched Pitts'
home on Woodland Avenue and found drug paraphernalia and voter
registration forms, the sheriff said.

Pitts, who over the past two decades has been convicted of crimes
ranging from domestic violence to resisting arrest, was not arrested
this week. She could not be reached for comment. A month ago, she had
just finished a year of probation for driving with a suspended
license.

Pitts told police that she was recruited by Thaddeus J. Jackson II,
who is coordinating the Toledo efforts of the NAACP Voter Fund.

Reached yesterday afternoon in Cleveland, Mr. Jackson described Pitts
as a "volunteer" with the group but said he knew of no problems with
her and of no voter fraud with her new-voter submissions.

"This is the first I've heard of it," he told The Blade.

He refused further comment on the case and representatives of the
voter fund in Washington declined to elaborate on Pitts' involvement
in the campaign.

In a statement issued late yesterday, Gregory Moore, the national
executive director, said the group was "shocked" by the allegations,
welcomed the investigation, and hoped it didn't hurt the reputation of
other "volunteers and canvassers who have worked tirelessly to
enfranchise the disenfranchised throughout the year."

Mr. Staton's 130 voter registration forms were among the 80,000
submitted to state officials by The National Voter Fund's Ohio office,
based in Cleveland. The fund turned in Mr. Staton's completed forms to
the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, elections officials said.

Of the 130 forms submitted, county elections board director Wayne
Olsson said that only six turned out to be legitimate.

Noting that the potentially new voters had listed addresses in
Defiance County, Cuyahoga County elections officials sent the forms to
Defiance County, where they arrived the afternoon of Oct. 8.

The package came with a small note inside from Cuyahoga County
officials: Check the signatures on the cards for fraud.

Within an hour, Defiance County elections workers had deduced that the
batch of 130 was mostly faked forms, said Laura Howell, the county
elections board's deputy director.

"We could tell by the handwriting that many of them were written by
the same person," she said. "And of course we know the streets.
Defiance being a small town, many of [the forms] had streets not even
in Defiance."

And so elections workers immediately began sending out letters,
addressed to the people listed at those addresses, as a precaution to
ensure that a Mary Poppins, a Jeffrey Dahmer, or a Janet Jackson
didn't, in fact, live in Defiance County, she said.

Letters also went out to George Foreman, Brett Favre, Michael Jordan,
and Dick Tracy, among others in the bundle to see if the post office
would return them as undeliverable.

Letters even went out to a handful of people registered on forms with
different personal identifiers but the same name: Chad Staton.

None of the Chad Statons made the cut.

In the meantime, elections officials contacted the office of Sheriff
Westrick, a Republican, who began an investigation that included the
Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification & Investigation.

Sheriff's deputies arrested Mr. Staton as he walked along a Defiance
street about 8 a.m. yesterday, and issued a press release by noon that
soon spread across the Internet.

The Ohio Republican Party immediately seized on the scandal. In a
statement issued hours later, spokesman Jason Mauk cited the case in
claiming that "the effort to steal Ohio's election is under way, and
it's being driven exclusively by interest groups working to register
Democrat voters."

The Ohio Democratic Party responded that they don't condone any
registration fraud. Spokesman Dan Trevas argued that, of the 500,000
forms submitted for newly registered voters, "the vast, vast majority
are clearly eligible voters who did the right thing."

He called it a "stretch" to link the Democratic Party and the NAACP
Voter Fund to fraud because "the volunteer to the volunteer did
something fraudulent."

But it's not the first complaint of fraud against the NAACP Voter
Fund, which insists it is nonpartisan.

Elections officials in Lake County, just east of Cleveland, last month
began investigating the group and an anti-Bush group called Americans
Coming Together, or ACT Ohio, for hundreds of suspicious registration
forms and absentee ballot requests.

Among them was one, submitted by the NAACP Voter Fund, for a man who'd
been dead for more than two decades.

Mr. Staton's arrest is not the first time someone who is paid to
collect voter registrations or petition signatures has been accusing
of falsifying them - such accusations have been made across the
country.