•CA-07: A little over a month ago, a story broke about a fraudulent voter registration drive in the Sacramento area, led by one Monica Harris, a Republican operative who, it turned out, had a serious criminal record that included embezzlement, theft, and prison time. And one of Harris's recent clients, as it happened, was GOP Rep. Dan Lungren, who denied involvement, saying that the "registration effort was not being run by the campaign."
Now, remarkably, he's defending the drive—to the hilt:
Lungren said he supported the voter drive and understood that there were sufficient safeguards in place to prevent fraud. "The overall registration effort made by the party was very successful. I am unaware of any single registration that was paid for by that program that had any problems," he said last week, adding that it's possible that the voters filling out the forms made mistakes.Let's just revisit what the Sacramento elections board—which doesn't have any skin in this game, apart from wanting valid voter registration rolls—said about Harris's fraud in May:
Jill LaVine, Sacramento County's registrar of voters, has turned over evidence of what she called registration fraud to the California Secretary of State's Office. She said that at least one-fourth of the 31,000 registration cards submitted by Harris and her circulators since September have been rejected for inaccuracies.Does Lungren plan to blame these magical party switches on the people who filled out the forms? I'm just baffled. Why isn't he just shutting up and letting Harris take the fall?Momentum Political Services was hired by the Republican Party of Sacramento County to conduct voter registration drives. LaVine said her office found numerous examples of people of having their political party affiliation switched to Republican against their wishes.