NATHAN SPROUL

Republican political consultant Nathan Sproul and his firm, Sproul & Associates, have been accused of a range of questionable activities - from deception to destroying voter registration forms of Democrats. Whether Sproul's tactics rise to the level of being illegal is in doubt… but what's clear is that, if they're true, they certainly fall in the "dirty trick" category.
Sproul allegedly misrepresented the nature of his firm so that he could hold voter registration drives in front of public libraries in key swing states prior to the 2004 elections. What's worse, his critics claim, is that his workers discarded registration forms of Democrats.
Following are excerpts from the Web site Salon.com (dated Oct. 24, 2004):

"… Eric Russell, a 26-year-old in Las Vegas, came forward last week with his explosive account. Russell, who has acknowledged a beef with the firm over pay, told his local CBS affiliate that supervisors at the company routinely discarded Democratic registration forms. The station, KLAS 8, managed to fish some from the trash, and when it contacted the affected voters they were, understandably, shocked."Sproul denied the allegation, and notes that he turned in voter registration forms of roughly 1,000 Democrats. But the number of Republican registration forms far outweighed the number of Democratic forms. And Russell is just one of several former Sproul employees to make the charges."
"In (former employee Kelly) Bragg's account, workers were asked to congregate outside local convenience stores and pretend to be nonpartisan political pollsters interested in the nuances of local opinion," reported Salon.com. "'If anyone asks what kind of poll [this is], it is a simple field poll to see what neighborhood support is,' reads the script Sproul handed Bragg. But if the respondents to this pretend poll said that they were Bush supporters, canvassers were told to offer to help them register to vote. If they said they were Kerry supporters, the canvassers would politely walk away."Bragg says that fooling people was the key to the job," the Salon.com story continued.

"Canvassers were told to act as if they were nonpartisan, to hide that they were working for the RNC, especially if approached by the media. Bragg's story mirrors the accounts provided to Salon by several librarians across the country who say they were contacted by Sproul in early September. In letters the firm sent to the libraries, Sproul misrepresented itself as America Votes -- a left-leaning national voter registration group not affiliated with Sproul -- but said that it was interested in registering "all those who wish to register to vote." Shortly after Sproul canvassers began working the libraries, though, patrons began complaining that the canvassers were being especially inquisitive about their political leanings, and some were pushing people to register as Republicans."