The Republican National Committee is cutting ties to Strategic Allied Consulting, a voter registration firm under investigation for turning in fraudulent voter registration forms in Florida. The RNC hired the firm to do voter registration drives for $3.1 million this year.

The firm’s founder, Nathan Sproul, is a longtime Republican strategist whose reputation was tarred by widespread accusations of voter registration fraud and attempts to suppress Democratic voter turnout. George W. Bush’s campaign reportedly paid Sproul over $8 million for his work in the 2004 election. Sproul, now under new scrutiny, claims he started Strategic Allied Consulting because the RNC wanted to hide his past:

Sproul said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the RNC’s request because the party wanted to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.

“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.

The committee is now scrambling to distance itself from Sproul after Florida launched a criminal investigation into the company. Strategic Allied Consulting submitted 106 “questionable” voter registration forms to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, and several other counties have discovered fraudulent forms as well. The Florida GOP fired the firm on Tuesday night.

Republicans have launched relentless efforts to prevent in-person voter fraud, which is exceptionally rare, yet seem to have ignored the real threat of voter registration fraud by their own consultant. In a twist one Florida Supervisor of Elections called “ironic,” Sproul’s organization was in fact registering dead voters as Republicans, even as Republican lawmakers all over the country justified discriminatory voter purges with the threat of dead voters showing up to the polls.

Members of an Ohio tea party group are taking it upon themselves to individually police alleged voter fraud, launching challenges to a targeted list of voters that includes hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. In all, the group has sought to remove from the voter rolls at least 2,100 registrations in 13 Ohio counties, nine of which Obama won in 2008, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The alleged perpetrators of this voter fraud include Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old recovering from cancer, whose apartment for the past seven years was allegedly listed as a commercial property; and eight members of an African American family, whose four-bedroom home where the family has lived since the 1980s was allegedly listed as a vacant lot. The group has also focused on challenging college students for failure to specify a dorm room number, a claim that every election board has thus far found invalid.

The group behind this crusade has dubbed itself the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, an offshoot of Texas-based True the Vote, which champions voter purges and voter ID laws and has been building a “poll watcher” network, an effort documented by Colorlines’ Brentin Mock:

[True the Vote National Elections Coordinator Bill] Ouren and Americans for Prosperity gathered these recruits in Boca Raton in July to instruct them on how they could become “empowered” vessels for True the Vote’s poll watcher program. True the Vote is most widely known for its advocacy of restrictive photo voter ID laws. But while that might garner headlines, the group’s real focus is on policing the act of voting itself. As Ouren declared during the group’s national summit in April, and repeated again in Boca Raton, his recruits’ job is chiefly to make voters feel like they’re “driving and seeing the police following you.” He aims to recruit one million poll watchers around the country. […]

True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as Ouren told a gathering in Houston. In 2010, the group was able to get a list of voter registration data from Republican Harris County registrar Leo Vasquez, who reportedly refused the same to the Democratic Party, for which the party sued. When the King Street Patriots submitted to him their list of fraudulent actions they claimed to see at the polls, Vasquez accepted them without verification and held a press conference with Engelbrecht asserting Harris County polls were “under a systemic and organized attack.”

Of course, these phony charges of voter fraud – a wildly exaggerated phenomenon — do more than harass legally registered voters; they provide an artificial justification for the real and considerable threats to disfranchisement that come from new restrictive voter suppression laws, such as the move to limit early voting in Ohio, now embroiled in litigation.

In the name of election integrity, Florida governor Rick Scott (R) has aggressively pursued voter purges, restricted voter registration drives and reduced early voting hours. However, his campaign finance reports reveal Scott’s 2010 campaign paid $5,000 to an accused absentee ballot broker for unspecified “contract labor.”

Before the 2011 municipal elections, 74-year-old Hialeh resident Emelina Llanes was accused of being a boletera, or someone who ostensibly helps voters deliver their ballots, but often tries to influence or bribe voters as they fill them out. Llanes, who worked for Mayor Carlos Hernandez at the time, visited elderly members of the community to talk to them about politics and delivered dozens of ballots.

Though records show Scott hired her for his gubernatorial campaign, her work for him remains unclear. Ballot brokering is one of the few methods of voter fraud that is in fact a problem in Miami-Dade County; other boleteros have been charged with forging signatures and taking advantage of senile voters. The Miami Herald’s report on boleteros may provide some insight into Scott’s payment:

“The ‘boleteros’ hover on the edge of the letter and spirit of the law,” said Christian Ulvert, a top state Democratic campaign consultant who has run races in Little Havana and Miami Beach.

“These boleteros in Miami Dade have become like some political consultants,” Ulvert added. “You don’t want them working for you. But you don’t want them working against you. So some candidates figure you just have to pay them.”

Scott won his seat by a margin of 20,745 absentee ballots in 2010. His voter suppression initiatives, such as his unsuccessful attempt to restrict voter registration drives and early voting schedules, have been mostly blocked by judges due to their impact on minority communities.

Since launching its 2012 Election Integrity Project in February, the right-wing Judicial Watch has been a leading player in the push for more voting restrictions. The group — best known for its Clinton-era lawsuits — has demanded more voting roll purges like Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) failed efforts in Florida. But a ThinkProgress examination of tax filings reveals that the group has received millions of dollars from foundations tied to conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife since the start of 2001.

Though other rich right-wing funders like Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess have gotten more attention in this campaign, Scaife has bankrolled the conservative movement for decades. A 1998 Washington Post story dubbed him the “funding father of the right.” Since the 1960s, the Pittsburgh media baron and heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative causes including the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution. He controls the Scaife Foundations — a group of conservative and philanthropic tax-exempt organizations. Between 2001 and 2010, the Allegheny Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Sarah Scaife Foundation — all part of the Sciafe empire — gave at least $5.8 million to Judicial Watch.

The Carthage and Sarah Scaife Foundations focus on “public policy programs that address major domestic and international issues.” Each has given millions to Judicial Watch. The Allegheny Foundation claims it “concentrates its giving in the Western Pennsylvania area and confines most of its grant awards to programs for historic preservation, civic development and education,” yet it too gave $67,000 annually to Judicial Watch in 2009 and 2010.

Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project has pushed states to purge what it believes to be ineligible voters from the voter rolls, criticized voter registration efforts, and fought for voter ID laws. While the group claims “election fraud was a significant concern during the 2008 and 2010 election season,” studies show that you a more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. And while these tactics to combat the alleged problem are likely to suppress voter turnout and registration, especially among minority groups, they would do little to stop actual voter fraud even if someone did want to commit it.

As the Pennsylvania Supreme Court prepares to review the constitutionality of the state’s photo ID law, a University of Pittsburgh law professor flagged the flimsy and offensive precedent upon which the lower court relied when it upheld the law. In rejecting the plaintiffs’ argument that the law violates the state Constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal elections,” the court cited the 1869 case of Patterson v. Barlow, which, Professor Jessie Allen points out, serves as a “blatant example of the anti-democratic voter suppression alleged by plaintiffs in the current voter ID case.”:

The law approved in Patterson enacted a complicated set of registration procedures for Philadelphia (with its large working-class and immigrant populations) and a simpler procedure for the rest of the state. . . . The opinion justifies a tougher process for Philadelphia voters because “rogues and strumpets do not nightly traverse the deserted highways of the farmer. Low inns, restaurants, sailors’ boarding-houses and houses of ill fame do not abound in rural precincts, ready to pour out on election day their pestilent hordes.”

For good measure, the court explained that to overturn the tighter procedures for Philadelphia voters “would be to place the vicious vagrant, the wandering Arabs, the Tartar hordes of our large cities, on a level with the virtuous and good man.”

If the language of the opinion isn’t offensive enough, the dissenting opinion makes clear that, even by the standards of the time, the law’s crippling impact on the right to vote should have been obvious. Amusingly, Judge Thompson’s dissent also reveals that the exaggerated fears of voter fraud have been with us for a very long time.

The professed, and possibly the real object of the law, was to prevent fraud in elections by voters. If this was the view of the framer of the act, I must in charity believe that it so engrossed his attention, as to lead to forgetfulness that among the barriers so ingeniously contrived to prevent it, the defeat of the duly qualified voters must inevitably occur. A remedy for a disease must be regarded as empirical, which would only eradicate it by producing a worse. If frauds were imminent by simulated voters, let penalties be provided for the rogues, and set honest and vigilant men to watch them, but let not the rights of honest voters be sacrificed to these apprehensions.

In her op-ed, Professor Allen points out that the Supreme Court could clearly distinguish the law at issue in the 1886 case from today’s photo ID law. But the “generalized and biased fears about fraudulent voting” could be applied equally to the present case, in which Pennsylvania has admitted there are “no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania,” and that they “do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.” Meanwhile, the law threatens to disfranchise as many as 750,000 state citizens, with new anecdotes of trouble obtaining a photo ID emerging every day.

Although Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) felt the need to question his state’s registered voters about their eligibility to vote, sending a letter earlier this month that asked about 4,000 Colorado residents to provide proof of citizenship, his office has confirmed that at least 88 percent of those voters are indeed U.S. citizens.

Gessler — who ran for office on the platform that “fair and open elections are the foundation of self-government” — sent a letter intended to target “suspected non-citizens” who applied for a driver’s license with a non-citizen document, despite the fact that it is entirely possible to apply for a license before becoming a citizen and before registering to vote. An ACLU public policy director called the letter “intimidating” and pointed out that the registered voters who received it are likely to be “worried that they did something wrong and that their paperwork is not in order.”

After running the voter information for 1,400 individuals through a federal database, however, Gessler’s office verified that the vast majority of the individuals who received the letter did have their paperwork in order and are eligible to vote. There are roughly 168 people remaining to be verified in the database, but an employee in Colorado’s election division acknowledged even this group “may also include people who are citizens.”

Although Gessler denies his attempted voter purge has any political motivation, about 40 percent of his letters were sent to registered Democrats, while only 13 percent went to Republicans. Voter suppression tactics, such as Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) failed voter purge in Florida, do tend to disproportionately target Democrat and Latino voters.

Despite the fact that Republican lawmakers across the country have been pursuing similarly aggressive strategies to tamp down “voter fraud” in their states, the only real threat to democracy is the voter suppression they perpetrate under the guise of stopping it. When pressed on the issue, even the authors and biggest proponents of stringent voter ID laws cannot cite examples of in-person voter impersonation. This is probably due to the fact that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.

Beyond wasting taxpayer dollars to send out unnecessary inquiries, Gessler’s effort may scare legitimate voters but does not appear to have discovered many — if any — illegitimate ones.

East Longmeadow Select­man Enrique John “Jack” Villamaino III (R), a candidate for the Massachusetts state legislature, is reportedly being investigated for voter fraud. The Boston Globe reported today that the county’s District Attorney is looking into a possible “illegal scheme to cast absentee ballots on behalf of hundreds of voters in hope of winning a primary election.” The paper notes that:

A friend of Villamaino’s who works in the East Longmeadow town clerk’s office is suspected of having changed the registrations in the office computers ­after work hours, according to one investigator who asked not to be named because the investigation is confidential.

Republicans have attempted to mislead voters into believing that voter fraud is a widespread problem — and used the issue to push suppression laws requiring voters to show government-issued identification in order to vote in-person.

These photo identification laws would, of course, do absolutely nothing to prevent this sort of election fraud. And while the Secretary of State of Massachusetts note that this sort of fraud is highly unusual, those involved will face criminal prosecution under the robust existing laws, if the investigation determines they are guilty.

As rare as election fraud is, many of the rare cases where it has been reported of late have ironically involved Republican candidates.