Norfolk voter-group employee indicted on election fraud

NORFOLK

A 22-year-old Norfolk woman who worked for a national voter registration organization was indicted Wednesday on three counts of felony election fraud.

Cassandra McNair is accused of turning in voter-registration applications that contained false information to the Norfolk voter registrar's office. She was employed by Community Voters Project, which has been involved in questionable voter-registration applications in other states.

It's the second round of voter fraud charges in Hampton Roads this election season. In July, three people, also hired by Community Voters Project, were charged in Hampton. Other questionable registrations are under review in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Norfolk.

Voter registration has become a flash point in the presidential race. Accusations of registration fraud have been highly publicized in several battleground states, but Virginia has escaped much of the scrutiny.

Representatives of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and Attorney General Bob McDonnell said the appropriate local authorities are handling the cases.

Denver-based Community Voters Project has a mission of registering minority voters. Its director, Ayodele Carroo, said her group has registered 85,000 minorities in Virginia over the past several months and more than 300,000 nationally.

"We're running a large voter registration effort," she said. "We're bound to run into a few problems in each place we're operating."

"We are very disappointed in those canvassers," Carroo said. "We have a zero-tolerance policy for faking forms. We conduct extensive checks for identifying fake forms."

Gordon Hickey, Kaine's spokesman, said Virginia lacks a history of voter fraud. "If there are isolated incidents, we urge people to contact local law enforcement or local registrars."

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Jeff Frederick disagrees. "I hear an incredible amount of stuff in regards to registration," Frederick said Wednesday, adding that he's not aware of anyone else being charged in Virginia.

Following the Hampton charges, he called for a statewide investigation into "what appears to be coordinated and widespread voter fraud activities."

Frederick was quoted this week in Time magazine comparing Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden.

Jared Leopold, spokesman for the Democratic Party of Virginia, challenged Frederick's assessment, calling it a scare tactic to encourage distrust of the electoral system.

"We've seen a few isolated incidents of problems," he said. "They're not worthy of statewide alarm." Leopold characterized the recent charges in Hampton Roads as "a couple college students trying to make quotas."

Carroo said that while Community Voters Project pays canvassers by the hour, the organization sets goals for registrations as a condition of employment.

She said the problem with fraud is purely a personnel issue.

"I don't think any of the people involved had any interest in changing the elections. They were just trying to get paid for not doing the real work."

Carroo said it was Community Voters Project that noticed the questionable paperwork in Hampton, fired the workers and alerted the registrar there.

In Norfolk, however, the registrar identified problems with hundreds of applications and referred some of that paperwork from eight to 10 canvassers to law enforcement authorities.

General Registrar Elisa Long said some of the irregularities spotted included multiple applications under a single name, duplicate personal information, applications taken over the phone, and applications filled out and signed by someone other than the named registrant.

"We had several national groups in Norfolk doing voter registration and we had no problem with any of the other groups that don't work on a quota system," Long said.

Carroo said her organization is nonpartisan and is associated with the Progressive Future Education Fund and the Center for Public Interest Research.

She said they are not associated with ACORN, which has received national notoriety for turning in fraudulent or duplicate voter-registration applications in many states.

Late Wednesday afternoon, police had not yet charged McNair.

Voter fraud is a felony, and a conviction carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $2,500 fine.

Debbie Messina, (757) 446-2588, debbie.messina@pilotonline.com