We recently offered a very few, long overdue words about Colorado’s embarrassingly bad, incredibly partisan, anti-democratic and anti-Democratic, wingnut Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R), when, as the state’s chief election official, he made a fool of himself with an attempted-then-aborted purge of “non-citizen” voters who, to Gessler’s inconvenience, turned out to not be “non-citizens”.

It’s not altogether surprising. The state is developing a rich history of cringe-inducing Secretaries of State.

The previous wingnut to hold the job, who is now, even more embarrassingly, U.S. House Rep. Mike Coffman (R), recently revealed his own confusion about which Americans are citizens and which are not, when he told the crowd at a fundraiser last May: “I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don’t know that. But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.”

Moving beyond the two most recent CO Secretaries of State’s embarrassing paranoia of alien invasion, Gessler isn’t done shaming the great state of Colorado with conspiracy theories, not by a long shot, as displayed at a wingnut “voter fraud” conference late last week in Denver. That, even as he has, publicly at least, completely ignored what now appears to be an actual criminal conspiracy, with actual evidence, concerning actual voter registration fraud (albeit by a Republican outfit, so perhaps it doesn’t count), acknowledged by his own office to be officially under criminal investigation by prosecutors in his state…

John Tomasic of the Colorado Independent offers the details…

See Tomasic’s report for some of Gessler’s actual evidence-free rants at the conference.

As to the news of a CO criminal investigation into Nathan Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting, a company said to have been created by the longtime GOP operative at the request of the RNC and hired by the state GOP for voter registration work, see Colorado Ethics Watch for details on how they obtained evidence of the probe that Gessler didn’t bother to mention during his rant, last week, at the Rightwing conspiracy conference on “Democratic voter fraud”.

As The BRAD BLOG reported last week in detail, Strategic Allied Consulting is currently under criminal investigation by the state of Florida for alleged fraudulent registration forms collected by the firm, and discovered to have been turned in by the FL GOP in at least 12 counties.

In Florida, according to election officials, address changes and other defects on registration forms turned in by the GOP are feared to lead to disenfranchisement on November 6th when voters show up to vote in the Presidential Election, only to learn that they are no longer registered where they thought they were registered. In years and elections past, Sproul’s firms have been investigated for destroying Democratic registration forms and/or changing party affiliations on them from Democratic to Republican.

Despite those allegations against Sproul (or perhaps because of them?), the RNC hired him again anyway. As the LA Times reports Sproul says “he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the Republican National Committee because of the bad publicity stemming from the past allegations,” in hopes of hiding his involvement with the new firm.

The RNC has since disputed Sproul’s claim. However, while Sproul declined to elaborate further on the assertion, he recently told The BRAD BLOG via email that he stands by his initial remarks.

A viral video tape of one of Strategic Allied’s registration workers seen lying to potential registrants in Colorado Springs recently, has revealed what appears to be a coordinated strategy by Republicans to try and keep Democratic-leaning voters from even being able to register to vote.

Following on the appearance of the CO tape on Youtube, The BRAD BLOG collected video evidence and more, of the very same scheme being carried out by Strategic employees in other states, including Nevada, Virginia and Florida, where they were also employed by the RNC. We also uncovered evidence that the same scheme is being carried out by GOP voter registration workers in Oregon, though Sproul has insisted to The BRAD BLOG that none of his companies are doing registration work in the state. If true, that would suggest that the insidious and dishonest scheme to misrepresent GOP voter registration workers as pollsters, instead, to potential registrants, in hopes of screening out Obama supporters, may, in fact, be a coordinated national Republican strategy going beyond just that of Sproul’s firms.

So far, while Sproul was forthcoming on several other issues, the former AZ Republican Party chair and head of the Christian Coalition has refused to confirm or deny to The BRAD BLOG whether his companies trained registration workers to deceptively misrepresent themselves as pollsters in order to determine if potential registrants might support Mitt Romney, rather than President Obama. Hard evidence from four of the five key battleground states where the RNC is known to have quietly hired Sproul for registration work this year, suggests that was precisely the way his employees were trained to carry out their duties.