Wednesday, July 21, 2004 | 10:55 a.m.
With aggressive voter-registration drives swamping the Clark County Election Department and officials seeing an increase in fraudulent voter registration, authorities say it's unclear where and how to prosecute those involved.
An undetermined number of voter registration forms have been forged in Clark County, and a few other suspect forms were turned into the Washoe County elections office, officials said.
Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he thinks 1 percent to 2 percent of the 21,090 new voter registration forms are fraudulent, although the number could be higher.
Staff members noticed stacks of forms in the same handwriting and turned the case over to the FBI, figuring the forms violated federal law. But the agency declined to investigate, he said.
Now the secretary of state's office is waiting for an investigation from the Nevada Division of Investigations, Secretary of State Dean Heller said. Attorney General Brian Sandoval could take further action, he said.
Lomax took his complaint to the secretary of state, Nevada's top election official, rather than local prosecutors because of suspected problems in Washoe County. That made Lomax consider it more of a state problem than a local issue.Lomax said it is difficult to tell how many of the record number of voter registration forms coming into the elections office are fraudulent, and his office doesn't have the staffing to check each form.
Political groups and parties have been registering voters in full force around the state, hoping to make a small difference in what is expected to be a tight presidential election.
In the past three weeks the Clark County Elections Department has processed 21,090 new voter registration forms, compared with the 6,057 forms processed in the same period in 2000.
In Washoe County officials are begging other counties for their spare voter registration forms because they have run out, Registrar of Voters Dan Burk said.
Other groups, such as Voices for Working Families, which is registering minority voters, have found that people in their target neighborhoods have been approached several times to register.
"We're seriously knocking on doors and someone will say, 'Someone was here a few hours ago, someone was here yesterday,' " state director Andres Ramirez said.
Competition to register voters is at an all-time high in the state, Ramirez said.
That's why state law prevents groups from paying people for each registration form filled out. Instead, workers should be paid by the hour to prevent the temptation to forge forms, according to the law.
Yet Lomax said he has indications that workers were paid by the form. And ultimately, hundreds or thousands of voters could turn up to the polls on Election Day and find out their address or political party is listed incorrectly in the county system, Lomax said.
The problems can be ironed out, but he worries it will slow the process and irritate voters.
"They might have picked your name out of a phone book and changed your party, changed your address," he said. "That's our biggest concern, is that people will show up on Election Day and someone will have muddied their form."
At least one group, the NAACP, has been notified by Lomax about the problems with voter registration cards.
Dean Ishman, president of the local branch of the NAACP, said he met with Lomax and determined that some people affiliated with the group had registered voters with their permission but failed to correctly fill out a box that indicates the voter did not fill out the form.
He said the group has worked with volunteers and did not have indications that forms from the group were forged.
Others wonder if some of the questioned forms might actually be legitimate -- and that a huge number of people are truly changing their party registration.
Ramirez pointed out that, in the 2002 election, a large number of labor members changed their registration to vote for former County Commissioner Mark James in the Republican primary.
"I'm not saying this is actually going on, but it wouldn't be beyond the possibility that a lot of these groups are doing the same thing in contested primaries," he said.
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