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Since you have to register with the Orlando Sentinel, I'll post the article. I heard from a few collegiate friends that this has been a HUGE problem at UCF. There's a couple who has been going around asking students to sign a "petition" for a law that will help prevent sexual abuse in children. After signing this petition, they received a voter card in the mail that had them registered as a Republican. The article mentions something about this.
Although you can be registered with a certain party and vote for another, it prevents you from being able to vote in the primaries and, on top of it, it's just plain wrong to try to "trick" students into registering for a certain political party! Interesting that this happened at 3 of the biggest schools in Florida which happen to be in counties that are overwhelmingly Democratic (Leon, Alachua, and Orange).
Orlando Sentinel
Officials doubt verity of 4,000 voter forms
College students' registrations spur complaints
By David Damron | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted October 20, 2004
Authorities in at least three Florida counties are investigating more than 4,000 suspicious voter-registration forms submitted on behalf of college students, some of whom say they already had registered elsewhere or that their party affiliation was changed to Republican without permission.
Although the reasons for the mystery were unclear Tuesday, reports of registration irregularities have popped up elsewhere as states count down to the Nov. 2 election. Supervisors in Florida said the latest problems could end up invalidating the votes of some unwary students next month.
"I decided it was fraud," Alachua County elections supervisor Beverly Hill said Tuesday, a day after she turned over about 500 of roughly 1,200 suspicious forms to the local State Attorney's Office in Gainesville. She said her staff spot-checked 30 of them, "And they were, across the board [saying], 'No, I never intended to do that.' "
Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho said he's received 3,000 photocopied registration forms, some of which he showed to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement because they looked strange and did not seem to make sense.
About 1,000 of the forms named black students from Florida State University, Florida A&M University and Tallahassee Community College. Nearly all claimed to be registering as Republicans, yet that county's black population is overwhelmingly registered Democratic, Sancho said.
In Orlando, the University of Central Florida police are investigating similar claims, though only 10 complaints have surfaced so far.
Most of these irregularities seem to stem from get-out-the-vote efforts that have been used across the state to add thousands of voters to the rolls. But circumstances differ from campus to campus.
At Valencia Community College and the University of Central Florida, a number of students reported signing petitions about abortion rights or favoring medical marijuana, only to later receive registration forms in the mail that they say they never requested.
At the University of Florida in Gainesville and at the Tallahassee schools, elections officials received large numbers of forms that looked doctored or showed heavy Republican registration in areas where Democrats are a clear majority.
Alachua supervisor Hill, a Democrat, said that the documents that raised alarms came from one student, Mark Jacoby, who handed in 1,218 forms -- nearly all of them from students claiming to want to be registered as Republicans.
Of those, 510 named people who already were registered in Alachua. Hill turned those over to local prosecutors. The rest were new registrants. Hill said she went ahead and processed them, to be sure the people could vote.
Contacted by phone Tuesday, Jacoby said he'd heard of Hill's concerns, but said he asked every newly registered voter to initial a box on the form to indicate they wanted to change party affiliation in cases where it mattered.
Jacoby declined to answer many questions, but he said he worked for a private firm that paid him to collect signatures. He declined to name that company or who ultimately paid for the work.
A senior adviser to the Republican Party of Florida confirmed later Tuesday that Jacoby worked for Arno Political Consultants, a firm subcontracted to register voters at UF, UCF and possibly other campuses.
The senior Republican adviser, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, said she had checked on the GOP efforts and was assured that all UCF and UF registration workers disclosed attempts by workers to obtain Republican party affiliations.
"They took extra steps . . . to make sure people knew they were registering as Republicans," Fletcher said.
Fletcher said she could not explain why all 30 people contacted by the Alachua supervisor's office said they did not want to be classified Republican.
"I can't guarantee you that's what those people were thinking when they signed that form that day," Fletcher said. "People really may not want to own up to that now."
UCF student Audrey Berk said she signed an abortion-rights petition in August and then, at the urging of the person collecting signatures, signed another sheet to confirm her identity. She didn't think much of it then.
But weeks later the Orlando Democrat got a letter from Orange County elections supervisor Bill Cowles informing Berk that the registration application she sent in that indicated a switch to the Republican Party was missing some information.
Confused, she called the election office to sort out what happened.
"I've made several calls to make sure I will be able to vote," said Burke, 23. "But if I hadn't done anything, it could have been a real mess."
In many cases, students registered as Republican against their wishes will have no problem voting Nov. 2. But a student registered legally in one county and falsely in another could have problems.
Leon County's Sancho said that his stepdaughter, Ashley Herrald, a UCF student, signed a petition on campus favoring medical marijuana, then got an Orange County voter card that she never requested. She plans to vote absentee in Leon County, but would have had her vote thrown out if she had not cleared up the issue, he said.
Any Florida college student who signed a petition or registered to vote on campus should check with local election officials to make sure they are cleared to vote there Nov. 2.
"It's now a question about how much confusion this is going to cause on Election Day," Santo said. "This is clearly aimed at young voters."
Similar registration fraud reports have popped up across the country. Nevada and Oregon election officials are investigating whether Democratic registrations were destroyed or discarded by bounty hunters paid to gather only Republican registrations.
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ZTA
Last edited by ZTAngel; 10-20-2004 at 11:07 AM.
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