By: Wesley P. Hester | Richmond Times-Dispatch
Published: July 25, 2012 Updated: July 25, 2012 - 12:00 AM
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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's campaign is asking Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to launch an investigation into voter-registration forms that are being sent to Virginia residents and addressed to deceased relatives, children, family pets and others ineligible to vote.
The errant mailings from the Washington-based nonprofit group Voter Participation Center have befuddled many Virginia residents, leading to hundreds of complaints.
The organization has been mass-mailing the forms — pre-populated with key information such as names and addresses — to primarily Democratic-leaning voting blocs such as young adults, unmarried women, African-Americans and Latinos.
In a letter to Cuccinelli's office and the State Board of Elections, Kathryn Bieber, an attorney for the Romney campaign, calls for an investigation into the matter by law-enforcement officials, claiming that the mailings appear to violate "at least one and maybe several Virginia laws aimed at ensuring a fair election."
Bieber refers to the mailings as "tactics that amount to, or at the very least induce, voter registration fraud," and says the issue "presents a very significant risk to the proper administration of the upcoming general election."
Citing a Sunday Richmond Times-Dispatch story that brought the mailings to light, the letter also asks the State Board of Elections to require registrars to reject all pre-populated voter registration applications from the group and review the eligibility of all Virginians who have registered in the past two months.
"This is the only way for voters and other interested parties to regain confidence in the voter registration and electoral process that has been abused by the Voter Participation Center," the letter says.
Page Gardner, president and CEO of the Voter Participation Center, said the organization mailed nearly 200,000 third-party registration forms to Virginia addresses in June, which resulted in 15,026 new voters being registered as of July 18.
On Monday, the Voter Participation Center responded to the Sunday Times-Dispatch story, stating in a letter on its website that "imperfections in the VPC vendors' lists — while regrettable and unfortunate — should not be the reason or the excuse to call an entire process that is working into question."
Justin Riemer, the State Board of Elections' deputy secretary, said forms have been sent by the group to deceased infants, out-of-state family members, and non-U.S. citizens, among others.
In a letter this month, the State Board of Elections asked the group to cease pre-populating their forms and raised questions about how the group was obtaining lists of registered voters, citing the errant forms.
Riemer noted that pre-populating the forms violates rules set forth in the state code and the Virginia Constitution requiring that voters fill out their own forms.
The State Board of Elections had not received the letter from the Romney campaign Tuesday afternoon and declined to comment on the specifics.
No comment was immediately available from Cuccinelli's office.
