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Parties pay for votes Condit country Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/3068980.htmhttp://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/3068980.htm
Posted on Mon, Apr. 15, 2002
Parties go toe to toe in Condit country
Hoping to make gains after scandal, the GOP signed up thousands of Merced County voters, some of them illegally
By Daniel Borenstein
TIMES POLITICAL EDITOR
While Democrats were cleansing themselves of Rep. Gary Condit, Republicans conducted an intensive voter registration drive in his congressional district that makes them competitive in three of the state's most closely watched elections.
Leveraging public outrage toward the beleaguered Democratic lawmaker and paying top-dollar bounties of $4 to $7 for every Republican enlisted, the GOP drove up its Merced County membership 31 percent in just four months.
But some "bounty hunters" hired by the party to sign up new voters used illegal voter registration tactics.
A party official acknowledges that there might be problems with hundreds of registrations and that two workers were fired after they gave prospective voters forms with the party affiliation already checked.
Residents reported bait-and-switch tactics, in which potential new voters were given a popular petition to sign and then a blank voter registration form underneath. "A lot of them didn't realize what they were signing," said Deanna Brown, Merced County deputy registrar of voters.
Brown, who has worked in the office 20 years, said she could not recall so many complaints during one election. Before primary Election Day, Merced County had already received about 50 voter complaints that sample ballots showed them registered incorrectly as Republicans.
On Election Day, the office received another 150 to 200 calls from voters and poll workers about incorrect registrations, mostly for people who said they should not have been on the GOP list, Brown said. "When they went to the polls and were given a Republican ballot, they said, 'I've never been a Republican' and they didn't realize they had signed a voter registration card."
Before Election Day, Merced County formally asked for a state investigation. A spokesman for Secretary of State Bill Jones, the only statewide Republican officeholder, will not confirm or deny that his office is looking into it.
Times interviews suggest that the state office has done little so far to investigate. That's in part because the county elections officials did not systematically keep track of the Election Day complaints or pass them on to the state officials they had asked to investigate them.
Democrats have recently launched their own voter registration drive to counter the Republican surge. In three districts, after last year's redistricting, Democrats expected to have solid registration advantages. Now they are facing potentially tight races.
Democratic mapmakers, using 2000 registration data, announced last year that their party enjoyed double-digit registration advantages in each of three Central Valley districts. That's no longer the case in any of them.
• The new 18th Congressional District, in which Condit sought re-election, was 52 percent Democratic, 35 percent Republican. But by February, that 17-percentage-point advantage was cut to six.
Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, who defeated Condit in the primary, now faces a tough campaign against state Sen. Dick Monteith, R-Modesto. The scandal surrounding Condit put the district on the national political radar. The new registration numbers are certain to keep it there.
• The new 12th state Senate District registration was 50 percent Democratic, 35 percent Republican. That 15-point margin has shrunk to six. Consequently, former Assemblyman Rusty Areias, D-Los Banos, faces a strong challenge from Salinas businessman Jeff Denham.
• The new 17th Assembly District was 53 percent Democratic, 35 percent Republican in the 2000 registration. That 18-point margin has shrunk to five. Incumbent Barbara Matthews, D-Tracy, must defend her seat against Merced attorney Brian McCabe.
The three districts overlap, and each completely covers Merced County, where Republicans put on the biggest push.
Dean Andal, a member of the state Board of Equalization who ran unsuccessfully for state controller in the March primary, put up $227,000 of his campaign money to fund the Central Valley registration drive.
Andal did not return calls seeking comment. As a result of the drive he funded, Republicans have turned Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Merced counties from Democratic majorities or pluralities a year ago to narrow Republican pluralities.
Of the three counties, the shift in Merced stands out. In June 2001, the county was 50 percent Democratic, 37 percent Republican. Four months later, it was even, with both parties at 44 percent. "It's a huge shift in registration for a county of that size," says Jones spokesman Alfie Charles.
Republicans added 8,840 voters in 118 days. "That's an astonishing increase," said Henry Brady, UC Berkeley political scientist. Colleague Bruce Cain concurred, adding that the explanation for the surge "has got to be Gary Condit."
Indeed, the push came at a time when the national media was focused on the beleaguered congressman. "The folks we had out registering people were using the Condit-Chandra Levy issue to supreme advantage and it made a big difference," said Jonathan Buettner, chairman of the Merced County Republican Party.
Buettner acknowledges that two workers were fired for using cards whose party registration was filled out in advance. State law forbids that, Charles said.
Douglas Fleming, 45, night manager of a local grocery, complained to the county elections office about tactics used in front of his store. "The deception method used by this registration drive," he wrote, "is to bait my customers with an alleged petition, and then switching them to a voter registration form that the registrar himself makes out."
One of Fleming's employees said that when he went to register, the person at the table in front of the store placed his finger over the portion of the form where the party is to be checked. The employee, who asked that his name not be used because he has a new job, said he started talking with someone else who had just registered and they figured out the scam.
When the employee went back out, he had to argue to get his form back and discovered he had been checked as a Republican. "I took my registration card and I tore it up," he said.
Erin Reitz, 20, a business major at Merced College, was headed for her car after class in September when an aggressive person "got up in my face" and tried to get her to register. At first, she balked. But he persisted and told her it was important that she regularly register to keep her voting privileges current.
"I started filling it out," she said. "I said I'm in a really big hurry. He grabbed it before I got to a chance to fill out the party registration. I didn't realize until I was at home thinking about it that I didn't even write down the affiliation."
Reitz, a Democrat, called the elections a few months later and discovered she was registered as a Republican and her birth date was posted as 1900. She reregistered before the primary.
Buettner, the county Republican leader, says the number of complaints to the elections office probably doesn't represent the full extent of the problem. He guesses that there were problems with somewhere between 250 and 1,000 voters.
The state party has since taken over the registration drive and put checks in place to ensure that its workers abide by the rules, he said.
"The party is not interested in paying for unethical card-gathering activities. We're interested in gathering a bunch of vibrant, excited and interested voters who want to vote for Republicans. We're not interested in creating a subset of angry voters."
But that might be what they've done. In the March election, which featured a hotly contested Republican gubernatorial primary, only about 33 percent of registered Republicans voted in the top-of-the-ticket race, compared to about 43 percent of Republicans statewide.
That suggests that, looking toward the November general election, the GOP might not have strengthened its ranks as much as leaders thought.
"A big unknown is how many of these new registrants are actually going to turn out and vote," said Jack Pitney, government professor at Claremont McKenna College. "It's one thing to fill out a registration form; it's another thing to get a ballot. Voting takes more effort than registering."
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Reach Political Editor Daniel Borenstein at 925-943-8248 or by e-mail at dborenstein@cctimes.com.
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