Thursday–Colin Small of Pennsykvania was arrested for his involvement with trashed voter registration forms. Small is part of RPV.
From 29nbc.com:
Just hours before the Monday deadline for voter registration, a Harrisonburg store manager made a discovery that will keep eight citizens from being silenced. Their completed registration forms were discarded like trash. Investigators don’t yet know if it’s criminal activity or just bad business.
A typical Monday afternoon at Tuesday Morning, a store in Harrisonburg, took a strange turn, when the manager Rob Johnson spotted someone putting a bag of trash in his recycling bin. Johnson went to retrieve the misplaced refuse.
“That’s when I realized, this bag is really light and looked inside,” Johnson said. “There was the manila folder with the eight voter registration applications, and I was like, we’ve got something here.”
The Rockingham County registrar says those forms belonged to would-be voters from three different counties. Their only common thread appears to be a recent registration drive in the Elkton area.
“We don’t know what the motive was to throw these away,” said Rockingham County Voter Registrar Doug Geib. “But I don’t think it was based on that… because there’s no way the people collecting the applications would know what party, what candidate these people are going to vote for.”
But will they be allowed to vote for anyone? The registrar went to the state to ask, and came back with good news.
Geib said, “The guidance I received from them was, yes, that they did meet the deadline. They were delivered to our office, and so they are going to be able to vote in the November election.”
Johnson got a thank you call from the mother of one of those affected voters, who was only 18 years old.
“That would be a big disappointment… your first election ever, to go in to vote for the first time, and be told you can’t do it,” Johnson said. “So whoever did this, it was pretty despicable.”
There is some suspicion of politics as usual from the sheriff’s department.
Ben Tribbett reported the story from Facebook.com on his blog, Not Larry Sabato, and reported the following:
4:00-5:00 today now the biggest hour in Not Larry Sabato HISTORY- over 51,852 views in one HOUR. Crushes previous record of 32,121 from a couple years ago.
Earlier today the Sheriff of Rockingham County and the Voter Registar just weren’t sure if it was criminal behavior. Perhaps Ben has and Channel 29NBC have given them cause to rethink this one and not brush it under the rug. I expect that readers wonder why someone would sneak a package to someone else’s dumpster for starters. That suggests wrongdoing to me.
Methinks that the Harrisonburg CYA has become a rapid Awwww Sh!t by tonight.
It’s Ben’s story. Go read the update to see who is being cozy with whom…hint: names you have seen before.
Even more update- Front page of the Washington Post:
From NLS blog:
Why risk arrest over 8 votes? What was he thinking?
More details as they unfold.
It might have been possible to tease out the 8 voters’ party affiliation if they hadn’t volunteered it. If someone had access to their phone numbers, they could have posed as a pollster, called, and possibly gotten the info. Then those registration forms could have been trashed.
I think both parties have their zealots – people who have no hesitation in doing whatever they think would get their candidate a win whether by legal means or not. It’s just funny that the party hollering the loudest about voter fraud seems to be the party most guilty of it this election cycle.
The only time we have any control of our elected representatives is during the voting process and now they want to take that away from some of us. That’s just disgraceful.
Hi Bear.
The Sheriff of Rockingham County blew this case off for a while and now it is front page of the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/republican-campaign-worker-charged-with-voter-registration-fraud/2012/10/19/c07cc378-1a01-11e2-94aa-9240e72ee00b_story.html?hpid=z4
What hasn’t been determined yet is motivation.
People don’t register by party in Virginia.
@Censored bybvbl
Small worked for a private company pinpoint employed by RPV. None of it makes sense.
Good for the facebook guy who spotted it and pressed the point and for Ben Tribbett who also screamed it from the roof tops on his blog.
Ben Tribbett also says that Strategic Allied Consulting didn’t just go away after the RNC said that it was firing them after the Florida brouhaha. The staff apparently was transferred over to Pinpoint which Tribbett said is still operating out of six of the RNC’s Virginia “Victory Offices” including one in Gainesville.
http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/doh/
Wait a minute. I am ASSURED by my liberal friends that there is NO SUCH THING as voter fraud! You simply MUST be mistaken.
The “vote-by-phone” thing the Republicans are pulling is funny.
From the looks of the guy, he doesn’t seem too bright or capable of such calculation. My guess is he tossed the ballots out of laziness.
Oops. That should be Bristow instead of Gainesville in my prior post.