Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash. [...]Most likely, any FBI investigation will be put off until after the election - just as the Florida "felons" wrongly purged from the voter lists in 2000 didn't have their voting rights restored until after the 2002 election was safely passed. What will happen in the meantime?
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats. [...]
"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assistant to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.
Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.
The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.
Needless to say, Nevada's a swing state - estimated by CBS news to be a "toss-up" with less than a month to go before the election. Voter registration closed today. The hundreds or thousands of disenfranchised Democrats appear to have little recourse - unless Republican governor Kenny Guinn steps in to extend the voter registration deadline. Governor Guinn's contact information can be found here.
