Deceptive tactics inflate GOP voter registration

Canvassers hired by a leading Republican group allegedly misled Oregon college students while gathering signatures

Edward Walsh - October 30, 2004

At 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 12, Rori Smith, a Republican Party official temporarily assigned to Oregon, and several other GOP operatives strode into the Barracuda nightclub in downtown Portland. They were on official party business.

Smith was delivering several thousand voter registration cards, all of them ostensibly new Republican voters, to a special drop-off point set up at the nightclub during extended registration hours on the last day to register to vote in this year's election.

But apparently unknown at the time to Smith and other GOP officials, it soon began to emerge that some of those cards -- the number is not known -- were signed by young people who were deceived into registering as a Republican, or who may have registered as an independent or a Democrat and then had the registration switched to Republican by someone else before the card was turned in.

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