The owner and an employee of a company accused of fraudulent voter registration drives in Sacramento County have been convicted of crimes of deception in the past. The owner of Momentum Political Services, Monica Harris, has an extensive criminal history, including a prison sentence for stealing from a family she befriended and buying a van with funds stolen from a youth agency, court records show. Two of her victims called Harris a "professional con artist." [...] 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. 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.

This bizarre story out of California shows that voter registration fraud can occur, but as usual, it's not the individual voter committing it.Harris, who has also recently worked to register voters for Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA-3), was getting $5 a registration, though whether she was getting a bonus for making as many of them as possible Republican isn't clear. Harris's long history of criminal activity should have precluded her from getting any contract registering voters, but clearly Republicans don't care about voter registration fraud if they think it's going to benefit them. This is not the first case of registration fraud in the state or in the country, where voters party registration is changed without their knowledge or approval to Republican.

The majority of the voter suppression efforts around the country don't address the bounty hunting problem in voter registration at all. Instead of going after these political consulting firms and the bounty system that pays them, Republican legislatures across the country are punishing actual, legitimate, registered voters. Because that's how they'll win.