DUPED VOTERS

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2006 by Kindy, Kimberly, Saavedra, Tony, Joseph, Brian

Records show residents tricked into switching party affiliations

It was Christmas 2005, and the Republican Party was celebrating.

In just eight months, a massive voter registration drive in Orange County, Calif., had signed up more than 26,000 new GOP recruits. Sixty percent came from the most hotly contested district in the state. Party leaders predicted the surge would give them an edge in the November 2006 elections.

Then the complaints rolled in.

In February, the Orange County registrar of voters received fraud allegations from dozens of Democrats who claimed they were switched to the Republican Party without their consent.

That spurred us to investigate. We found that people initially were approached to sign petitions to cure cancer or stop criminals and then duped into registering as Republicans by those who were paid to gather names. Our stories have prompted a criminal investigation and made the California Legislature consider prohibiting voter registration workers from being paid per signature.

Bogus registrations

When we first began, we broke a quick story about the 37 complaints from Democrats. We verified that the California Republican Party paid for the drive by reviewing disclosure forms on the Federal Election Commission's Web site (www.fec.gov).

Next, we began looking for more victims. For $30, we obtained computerized voter rolls from the secretary of State's office, which helped us identify the pool of potential victims.

Using that database and 2005 voter data we already had, we pinpointed voters whose party affiliations were changed to Republican during the registration drive. To limit our search, we focused on seven dates on which the most party affiliations were changed. We counted 200 potential victims.

During the next two weeks, a team of seven reporters worked late into the night using voter registration information, LexisNexis and Google to track down phone numbers. When we called the supposed GOP converts, many were surprised and angry.

Their stories struck a familiar note: Victims were approached in shopping center parking lots across Orange County and asked to sign petitions to cure breast cancer, punish child molesters or build schools. After signing a flurry of papers, the shoppers were asked to sign one last form featuring a box marked, "Republican."

If questioned, signature gatherers assured the people that marking the box would not change their party affiliation. It just meant that the petition drive was sponsored by the Republican Party, they said.

Just like that, the signature gatherers duped the harried shoppers into signing GOP voter registration cards.

Among the victims was a lifelong Democrat who was pressured to fill out forms even though she didn't have her glasses and couldn't see what she was signing.

We traced the bogus registrations to a number of signature gatherers, including Christopher Scott Dinoff, who checked out 13,000 blank registration cards from the registrar's office. He was arrested three years earlier on suspicion of voter registration fraud in Oregon.

We identified Dinoff and determined he was a major player by using a simple form the registrar's office keeps on file each time it releases a box of blank registration cards. The form requires the recipient to provide the following information: name, contact information; the number of cards checked out; and the tracking numbers assigned to each card. In most cases, the managers of registration drives check out the cards and also hire teams of signature gatherers.

Often, the managers later show up as signature gatherers on registration affidavits, which the signature gatherers fill out and attach to registration cards for each registrant. The affidavit requires that signature gatherers provide their signature, full name, telephone number and home address. The registrar's office keeps a PDF copy of the affidavits, which we ordered for all the people who complained. Although not every signature gather properly filled out the affidavits, we were able to track down key players who were responsible for the fraudulent affiliation switches.

Criminal investigation

As we explored the world of signature gatherers, we learned they live as nomads, moving from state to state and following the cash in an industry where signatures are the lifeblood of politics. Petitioners often earn a bounty for each signature. In Orange County, bounties spiked as high as $12 during the drive. Prosecutors say the practice fuels registration fraud.

In the end, we reached 134 voters. Of these, 112, or 84 percent, said they were flipped to the Republican Party against their will. Victims subsequently flooded the registrar of voters' office with demands to have their true party affiliations restored.

Five days after our April 1 story, the California Attorney General's office announced it was teaming with the secretary of State in a historic, joint criminal investigation of the fraud.

By then, 167 complaints had surfaced, and we were hearing that some of the unregulated signature gatherers had unsavory histories. We discovered that among the most active workers in Orange County were a convicted child molester, an immigrant smuggler and a prostitute.