Witnesses say Sproul committed registration fraud

THE RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE
Signs of Voter Fraud Appear
Registrations that are faked or tossed out have emerged in key states struggling to comply with ballot reform and a flood of new signups.
By Richard Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writers

October 27, 2004

LAS VEGAS — Broke, disabled and living at the Daisy Motel in downtown Las Vegas, Tyrone Mrasek Sr. took a temporary job late this summer registering voters here.

The employer primarily wanted President Bush supporters, but they were not easy to find. So Mrasek handed out cigarettes to drunks and ex-felons at a homeless shelter in exchange for signatures. Later he found a stack of signed registrations for Democratic voters in a trash can outside the company's office, he recalled.

"They had some shady things going on," Mrasek said.

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Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has funded one company at the center of allegations, Voter Outreach of America Inc., which is active in Las Vegas and across the nation. It was set up by Nathan Sproul, former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.

Mrasek, who is disabled with emphysema, said he and his son spotted a newspaper ad for the Sproul group. The younger Mrasek, who also is disabled and lives with his father at the Daisy Motel, bowed out when he learned the emphasis was to register GOP voters.

His father took the Sproul job, which paid about $8 an hour and allowed workers to go home early with full pay on days they managed to register 18 Republicans.

Mrasek said he was given a written script to ask people whether they favored Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry. To those favoring the Massachusetts senator, Mrasek replied that he was just taking a poll and thanked them for stopping.

But for those who liked Bush, Mrasek offered to register them. "George Bush really needs your help this election," he said he was told to say.

In predominantly Democratic Las Vegas, however, Mrasek had a hard time finding unregistered Republicans, he said. One day, he registered himself and his son as Republicans to meet his quota, though he opposes Bush's Iraq policies and plans to vote for Kerry.

Eric Russell, another temporary employee for the project, also alleged that he saw Democratic Party registrations thrown in the trash. With legal assistance from the Democratic Party, he went to court and tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen registration.

Russell, a Republican who now plans to vote for Kerry, also gave authorities a copy of the written sales pitch, which said, in part, "Use your training to find likely Republicans."

Sproul denied the allegations. He said he fired Russell and then sued him, alleging he and the company had been slandered.

"Our goal was to register as many supporters of President Bush as we could. However, we gave very strict instructions to everybody associated with us that we had a zero tolerance policy if anybody was destroying, tampering or altering registration forms," he said, adding that his project turned in more than 500 Democratic registrations in Nevada.

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But Sproul also has run into trouble in Oregon, where Secretary of State Bradbury opened an investigation this month into allegations from three Sproul employees that the organization had destroyed Democratic registrations, a felony.

And in West Virginia, Lisa Bragg, the mother of two teenagers desperate for a job, decided against working for Sproul after seeing a written sales script that flatly declared, "The goal is to register Republicans."

"It was dishonest," said Bragg. "I didn't want to hide in the bushes and not sign up Democrats."

An admitted Democrat, she called the pay "dirty money."