Thousands Missing on Registrar’s List

Several thousand voters in Los Angeles County went to their polling places Tuesday, only to find they weren’t on the list--the unintended victims of the county’s stepped-up efforts to combat suspected widespread voter registration fraud.

The voters who did show up were given “provisional” ballots and allowed to vote while the county investigates whether they were legally registered, said county Registrar of Voters Conny McCormack.

Over the past several months, McCormack and her staff had concluded that two voter outreach groups had registered as many as 16,000 voters through potentially fraudulent means. When the county sent those new registrants a follow-up confirmation card, most came back as being undeliverable, either because the people appeared to be fictitious or didn’t live at the addresses listed, McCormack said.

That led McCormack and investigators from the district attorney’s office to conclude that workers employed by the two registration groups were submitting fake names in order to get paid more money. Or, she said, they took real names from the phone book, but gave them other addresses.

As a precaution, the county did not add any of those names to the voter rolls. So if those voters showed up Tuesday, there was no record of them being eligible to vote, McCormack said.

McCormack said Tuesday that only five of the 16,000 newly registered voters applied for absentee ballots, so it appears that the two groups were not trying to influence a campaign through the manipulation of absentee ballots.

“I just think it was tied to bounty hunters trying to make money,” said McCormack. She said a criminal investigation into the matter is continuing.