Canvassing group calls it quits for casino drive

COLUMBUS (AP) — A national canvassing group has resigned from a pro-casino ballot campaign in Ohio after turning over evidence of alleged fraud by a temporary employee.

Washington, D.C.-based FieldWorks said Thursday it has zero tolerance for fraudulent conduct and has fired the accused employee.

Spokeswoman Laurie Moskowitz said FieldWorks is participating actively in rooting out any further cases of apparent fraud or forgery. The problem is limited to just a few of the workers assigned to contact voters for the Ohio Jobs & Growth Committee, she said.

“This activity appears to be isolated to a handful of the nearly 200 temporary FieldWorks employees who have been working in Ohio,” the group said in a statement. “It also applies to only a very small percentage of the many thousands of VBM (vote by mail) applications that have been processed in Ohio. The activity only involved absentee ballot applications and not any ballots themselves.”

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters earlier this week launched an investigation into the matter, after sheriff’s deputies raided the pro-casino committee’s Cincinnati offices Monday. He is expected to take the issue to a grand jury.

Employees at the Hamilton County Board of Elections noticed discrepancies in 38 mailed-in applications last week. Most of the discrepancies involved birth dates and signatures that did not match election records.

Election workers contacted several people whose names were on the applications and were told by the voters that they had not requested an absentee ballot and hadn’t authorized anyone to do so for them.

Evidence of alleged fraud also has turned up in Franklin County, where the board of elections received six or seven questionable absentee ballot applications and sent them to Hamilton County for comparison. The board’s director said the handwriting, application form, and misinformation in the date of birth and other identifying fields met the pattern of the Hamilton County applications.

Moskowitz said the casino committee had no role in the suspected fraud. She said FieldWorks decided to resign to keep from being a distraction in the election.

Jobs & Growth is pushing a Nov. 3 ballot issue to authorize casinos in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo.

Casino issues in Ohio historically fail, but they tend to fair best in the counties where the proposed casinos would be located. The two counties where the alleged fraud has surfaced are home to the proposed Cincinnati and Columbus casino locations.

Authorities told The Associated Press no suspected fraud cases have arisen in the counties where Cleveland and Toledo are located.

Committee chairman Charlie Luken said in a statement earlier this week that the workers’ job was to go door to door and help voters fill out absentee ballot applications and submit them if asked to do so by a voter.

Deters said the Jobs & Growth Committee was cooperating with the investigation.

Moskowitz said that temporary workers are warned during training that falsifying voter applications is a felony. She said the workers are not paid on a per-application basis, but earn a base rate. FieldWorks does set production goals for the employees, such as the number of houses to reach in a day, she said, but meeting the goal is not required to be paid.

In an apparently unrelated case, election officials in Lorain County outside Cleveland warned voters to double-check the status of all requests for absentee ballots that allow voting ahead of the November election.

The warning came after about 10 calls from voters over the past two days who said they had not yet received their ballot. Elections director Jose Candelario told The Lorain Morning Journal that none of the early ballots had been requested.

He suspects paid phone solicitors gave the voters the impression they would request the ballots for them. However, the absentee ballots must be requested on an application signed directly by the voter, not by a third party.