10:01 PM PDT on Wednesday, October 13, 2004

By kgw.com and AP Staff

Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury and Attorney General Hardy Myers said Wednesday they plan to investigate allegations uncovered by KGW that paid canvassers in Portland may have destroyed voter registration forms.

KGW

Canvasser Mike Johnson (left) reaches into his bag to pull out voter registration forms.

"I have never in my five years as secretary of state ever seen an allegation like the one that came up tonight -- ever," Bradbury said of a KGW report that aired Tuesday night on NewsChannel 8 at 11. "I mean, frankly, it just totally offends me that someone would take someone else's registration and throw it out."

KGW interviewed Mike Johnson, 20, a canvasser collecting signatures in downtown Portland, who said he was instructed to only accept Republican registration forms. He told a KGW reporter that he "might" destroy forms turned in by Democrats since he was being paid by the Republican party.

In addtion, Bradbury said there were other complaints that have come from outside the Portland metro area about improper voter registration practices. Those will also be part of the probe.

Johnson told KGW he works for a group that conducted voter registration efforts in Nevada before coming to Oregon. That group is believed to be a Chandler, Arizona-based consulting firm called Sproul & Associates , which is now the target of a voter fraud investigation by Nevada authorities.

KLAS-TV in Las Vegas recently interviewed a former employee of the private voter registration organization who said hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of Democratic registration forms there had been destroyed.

Eric Russell, who worked for a Sproul & Associates group called Voter Outreach of America, said he had personally witnessed his boss take out eight to ten Democratic registration forms from a pile and shred them in Nevada.

Sproul & Associates is run by Nathan Sproul, a former head of the Republican Party in Arizona who has subcontracted with the Republican National Committee to do voter outreach efforts.

Sproul has denied any shredding occurred in Nevada, saying that "we registered anyone who wanted to register."

Back here in Oregon, Douglas County Clerk Barbara Nielsen said she had received a complaint from voters who said canvassers working for Sproul & Associates had tried to push them into registering as Republicans, saying otherwise the canvassers wouldn't get paid for their efforts.

Additionally, Nielsen said she had gotten calls from Roseburg-area voters who said that canvassers from the Sproul group had implied that their cards wouldn't be turned in if they registered as Democrats.

Bradbury said that in Oregon, it is a class-C felony, punishable by five years in jail or a $100,000 fine, to alter a voter registration form, or to throw one away. He added that canvassers can't turn away a voter because of his or her party affiliation.

The source of the problem seems to stem from paying canvassers per registration, Bradbury observed.

"In Oregon, we have outlawed paying per signature on initiative petitions because it just inspires fraud," Bradbury said. "I don't see any reason to believe that a bounty system on voter registrations is any less likely to inspire fraud, so we need to investigate."

This isn't the first time that Sproul & Associates have surfaced in Oregon. Last month in Medford, a librarian was approached by a group claiming to be affiliated with the progressive, nonpartisan America Votes organization, with a request to set up registration booths in the library.

When librarian Megan O'Flaherty probed into the group, she found that instead, they were part of Sproul & Associates, and had nothing to do with America Votes.

Kevin Looper, the director of the Oregon chapter of America Votes, said lawyers for the group are looking into the situation.

"We take this extremely seriously," he said. "When you are engaged in voter registration, you are obligated to turn in every card."

Other stories of unorthodox voter registrations have also surfaced throughout the state.

In Eugene, several University of Oregon students were approached by canvassers circulating a petition to crack down on child molesters and told they must register as Republicans in order for their signatures to "count."

"They told me that by registering as a Republican, I would be helping people fight child molesters," said Elizabeth Thygeson, 19, who had already registered as a Democrat. "I didn't appreciate that. It wasn't exactly the truth."

The voter fraud accusations in Oregon and Nevada have put the GOP on the defensive.

The Republican National Committee issued a statement Wednesday that said its party has "a zero-tolerance policy for anything that smacks of impropriety in registering voters."

And Rory Smith, a spokeswoman for the Republican Party in Oregon, denounced the alleged misconduct saying, "We do not condone this type of behavior."

(KGW reporter Keely Chalmers contributed to this report.)