Remember how ACORN used fake names when they were soliciting cotes for Barack Obama? Now there’s another Democratic Party organization soliciting voter registration that is under suspicion, this time in Ohio.
FieldWorks, a private Washington, D.C. based firm that works with Democratic candidates, causes and progressive organizations to collect signatures for voter registration or ballot initiatives, has even submitted this name on one of its forms: John Adolf Hitler.
The Hamilton County Board of Elections doesn’t think it’s a trivial matter. Alex Triantafilou, an Elections Board member who also serves as the Chairman of the county’s Republican Party, said:
“It’s certainly not a joke. In Ohio, that kind of activity is a felony. Any person who would engage in that kind of conduct with something as serious to our democracy as voting, is highly irresponsible and potentially criminal…We have someone doctoring registrations, and the next step would be a serious move toward fraudulent voting. We are worried about it.”
The Hitler ruse was one of roughly 200 voter registrations that election officials say were possibly fraudulent, forged, or duplicated by FieldWorks. FieldWorks, which says it has zero tolerance for this kind of behavior, has fired two workers in Cincinnati over the issue.
Elections officials in Cuyahoga County say that in Cleveland, FieldWorks is also under suspicion; three FieldWorks canvassers have been referred to the local prosecutor after signatures that looked fraudulent were found on petitions to get an initiative on the ballot.
Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Deputy Chairman Pat McDonald blasted:
We had problems with FieldWorks. We found multiple individuals where it looked like it was the same signature from the circulator who was circulating the petitions…we want to make sure there is no potential fraud in any entity of elections administration.
Last month, a former Ohio FieldWorks canvasser, 21-year-old Timothy Zureick, plead not guilty to 22 counts of felony false voter registration and one count of election falsification. There may have been pressure on canvassers to make quotas; one of the workers fired in Cincinnati claimed that FieldWorks had a quota that entailed soliciting 24 completed registration cards during a 7 and 1/2 hour shift.