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http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041019/NEWS09/41
0190343

Article published Tuesday, October 19, 2004

ELECTION 2004
Voter fraud case traced to Defiance County registrations volunteer
124 registrations falsified, allegedly for crack cocaine

By JOE MAHR
BLADE STAFF WRITER


Mary Poppins. Jeffrey Dahmer. Janet Jackson. Chad Staton.
Defiance County elections officials were confident the first three 
hadn't moved to their small community. But the fourth one lived there, 
and - in exchange for crack cocaine - tried to falsely submit the first 
three names and more than 100 others onto the county's voter 
registration rolls, police said.

Now Mr. Staton, 22, of Defiance, faces a felony charge of false 
registration in a case that has quickly gained national attention as 
part of a hotly contested presidential battle that's attracted a flurry 
of new voter registrations across the country - and a flurry of 
complaints of voter registration fraud.

Defiance County Sheriff David Westrick said that Mr. Staton was working 
on behalf of a Toledo woman, Georgianne Pitts, to register new voters. 
She, in turn, was working on behalf of the NAACP National Voter Fund, 
which was formed by the NAACP in 2000 to register new voters.

Sheriff Westrick said that Pitts, 41, of Toledo, admitted she gave Mr. 
Staton crack cocaine in lieu of cash for supplying her with completed 
voter registration forms. The sheriff declined to say how much crack 
cocaine Pitts supplied Mr. Staton, or to say whether Pitts knew that the 
forms Mr. Staton gave her were falsified.

"That remains under investigation," he said.

Defiance County sheriff's deputies and Toledo police searched Pitts' 
home on Woodland Avenue and found drug paraphernalia and voter 
registration forms, the sheriff said.

Pitts, who over the past two decades has been convicted of crimes 
ranging from domestic violence to resisting arrest, was not arrested 
this week. She could not be reached for comment. A month ago, she had 
just finished a year of probation for driving with a suspended license.

Pitts told police that she was recruited by Thaddeus J. Jackson II, who 
is coordinating the Toledo efforts of the NAACP Voter Fund.

Reached yesterday afternoon in Cleveland, Mr. Jackson described Pitts as 
a "volunteer" with the group but said he knew of no problems with her 
and of no voter fraud with her new-voter submissions.

"This is the first I've heard of it," he told The Blade.

He refused further comment on the case and representatives of the voter 
fund in Washington declined to elaborate on Pitts' involvement in the 
campaign.

In a statement issued late yesterday, Gregory Moore, the national 
executive director, said the group was "shocked" by the allegations, 
welcomed the investigation, and hoped it didn't hurt the reputation of 
other "volunteers and canvassers who have worked tirelessly to 
enfranchise the disenfranchised throughout the year."

Mr. Staton's 130 voter registration forms were among the 80,000 
submitted to state officials by The National Voter Fund's Ohio office, 
based in Cleveland. The fund turned in Mr. Staton's completed forms to 
the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, elections officials said.

Of the 130 forms submitted, county elections board director Wayne Olsson 
said that only six turned out to be legitimate.

Noting that the potentially new voters had listed addresses in Defiance 
County, Cuyahoga County elections officials sent the forms to Defiance 
County, where they arrived the afternoon of Oct. 8.

The package came with a small note inside from Cuyahoga County 
officials: Check the signatures on the cards for fraud.

Within an hour, Defiance County elections workers had deduced that the 
batch of 130 was mostly faked forms, said Laura Howell, the county 
elections board's deputy director.

"We could tell by the handwriting that many of them were written by the 
same person," she said. "And of course we know the streets. Defiance 
being a small town, many of [the forms] had streets not even in 
Defiance."

And so elections workers immediately began sending out letters, 
addressed to the people listed at those addresses, as a precaution to 
ensure that a Mary Poppins, a Jeffrey Dahmer, or a Janet Jackson didn't, 
in fact, live in Defiance County, she said.

Letters also went out to George Foreman, Brett Favre, Michael Jordan, 
and Dick Tracy, among others in the bundle to see if the post office 
would return them as undeliverable.

Letters even went out to a handful of people registered on forms with 
different personal identifiers but the same name: Chad Staton.

None of the Chad Statons made the cut.

In the meantime, elections officials contacted the office of Sheriff 
Westrick, a Republican, who began an investigation that included the 
Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification & Investigation.

Sheriff's deputies arrested Mr. Staton as he walked along a Defiance 
street about 8 a.m. yesterday, and issued a press release by noon that 
soon spread across the Internet.

The Ohio Republican Party immediately seized on the scandal. In a 
statement issued hours later, spokesman Jason Mauk cited the case in 
claiming that "the effort to steal Ohio's election is under way, and 
it's being driven exclusively by interest groups working to register 
Democrat voters."

The Ohio Democratic Party responded that they don't condone any 
registration fraud. Spokesman Dan Trevas argued that, of the 500,000 
forms submitted for newly registered voters, "the vast, vast majority 
are clearly eligible voters who did the right thing."

He called it a "stretch" to link the Democratic Party and the NAACP 
Voter Fund to fraud because "the volunteer to the volunteer did 
something fraudulent."

But it's not the first complaint of fraud against the NAACP Voter Fund, 
which insists it is nonpartisan.

Elections officials in Lake County, just east of Cleveland, last month 
began investigating the group and an anti-Bush group called Americans 
Coming Together, or ACT Ohio, for hundreds of suspicious registration 
forms and absentee ballot requests.

Among them was one, submitted by the NAACP Voter Fund, for a man who'd 
been dead for more than two decades.

Mr. Staton's arrest is not the first time someone who is paid to collect 
voter registrations or petition signatures has been accusing of 
falsifying them - such accusations have been made across the country.

And the NAACP Voter Fund is not the first group to come under fire.

Among the others are a Republican-linked group, Voters Outreach of 
America, which has been accused of destroying voter-registration forms 
its workers had collected from Democratic voters in Nevada and Oregon.

Contact Joe Mahr at:
jmahr@theblade.com
or 419-724-6180.


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