Republicans call for bipartisan teams to watch for voter fraud

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Warning of potential voter fraud, Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie on Monday called for the creation of bipartisan teams to go into polling places on Election Day to watch for and investigate irregularities in Missouri and other battleground states.

Gillespie said he first proposed the idea to his counterpart in the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, in a June 15 letter but has yet to hear back.

"I think it's innovative, it's transparent, it's bipartisan and it would help make sure that people have faith in the electoral process," he said during a stop at the Downtown Airport in Kansas City. He said he didn't know how many precincts would be involved nationwide or in Missouri.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said he couldn't confirm that McAuliffe had received the letter but said the party is committed to making sure voting irregularities are avoided or dealt with.

State political officials said poll watchers are common already.

"It's something we implement to protect the integrity of the voting process," said Missouri Republican Party spokesman Paul Sloca, adding that the GOP had around 150 poll watchers for the 2002 election cycle.

The Missouri Democratic Party uses monitors in strongly Democratic precincts to watch turnout, party spokesman Jim Gardner said.

In addition, state law requires all precincts have an equal number of election judges from both parties.

Gillespie said the plan was borne out of concerns his party has with voter registration efforts by such groups as America Coming Together, a Democratic-leaning organization that made news recently when it acknowledged that some of its employees going from door to door were convicted felons.

"People deserve a second chance and if you serve your time, we ought to encourage people to participate in the process," Gillespie said. "But at the same time, the public should know that these organizations don't seem to have a process to screen these people out."

ACT has since begun screening its workers. Asked if the Republican Party screened its voter registration personnel for criminals, Gillespie said they were all volunteers, not paid employees.

"It's impossible to screen volunteers in a way that it's possible to screen paid employees that you're going through a hiring process with," he said. "But we will make clear to people that we don't want ... felons convicted of violent crime in the volunteer process."

He added that he felt ACT and Missouri Pro-Vote, another group registering voters, were purposely flooding local elections offices with scores of voter registration forms, increasing the likelihood of unqualified voters being registered.

He noted a recent study of the conservative Center for Ethics and the Free Market that showed a quarter of the forms turned in by the two groups to the elections supervisor in St. Louis were tossed out.

ACT spokeswoman Sara Howard responded that most of the rejected registrations belonged to people who were already registered voters or changing their address and that less than 2 percent of the forms involved unqualified voters. She said the Republican Party's true mission was to scare people away from getting registered through ACT, which focuses on low-income areas.

"It's pretty clear that they're trying to raise questions about the validity of our operation and, unfortunately, the facts just don't back those accusations up," Howard said.