Torres: "This is about voter suppression."

I just jumped off a conference call with some members of the Democratic National Committee and CDP Chair Art Torres about the arrest of YPM founder Marc Jacoby on suspicion of voter registration fraud. As you may know, Jacoby's firm has been "slamming" voters in the Riverside County area, telling them that they were signing ballot initiatives but actually flipping their party affiliation to the Republican Party from the Democratic Party. While the substance of the call was to talk about hypocrisy in the GOP, raising the issue of ACORN in recent weeks while blinded to the fraud their own vendors participate in, Torres was pretty unsparing in his description of YPM. "The California GOP and the RNC need to terminate their relationship with YPM immediately," said Torres. "They shouldn't wait for a conviction to distance themselves from these shady practices." It was revealed yesterday that a joint finance committee of the RNC, McCain-Palin and the Yacht Party has been paying Nathan Sproul, who owns a separate voter registration group that has been accused of rampant fraud. Said Torres, "This is a consistent pattern of bad behavior."

Curiously, nobody seems to be talking about the bigger issue here, which is the fact that YPM was not only slamming voters, but changing their ballot status to absentee, so that when a voter goes to the polling place on Election Day, they are told that they signed up to vote by mail and cannot vote in the election without their absentee ballot. There are issues with slamming, related mainly to GOTV efforts (Democrats don't try to turn out Republicans), but the absentee situation is a pretext for real disenfranchisement. So I asked Chairman Torres about this, and he agreed. "This is designed to create confusion at the polls and force people into filling out provisional ballots. There are still hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots that haven't been counted from Ohio in 2004. This is about voter suppression, and we've seen it over and over again in California." He related it to the Dirty Tricks Initiative and the signature gathering fraud used to try and get that on the ballot.

The question, of course, is what we can do about the particular voters affected. YPM is out of business and hopefully their founder will be in jail. But there is no telling how many voters had their party ID switched or their ballot status switched. Hopefully the Secretary of State can come up with some way to verify anyone who passed through YPM's hands.