Petitioners prowling parking lots and community college campuses tricked dozens of young Orange County voters into registering to vote as Republicans, an Orange County Register investigation has found.

The con occurred at the end of January and the beginning of February at places like Cypress College and Golden West College, and outside of discount stores like Wal-Mart and Food 4 Less. It appears to be the same kind of voter registration fraud that engulfed Orange County four years ago and landed eight signature gatherers in jail.

Since mid-March, at least 99 written complaints have been submitted to state elections officials by Orange County residents who say they were registered to vote Republican without their consent. The Register found an additional 74 voters who said they were duped or coerced into registering to vote as a Republican by signature gatherers who initially asked them to sign petitions for causes like legalizing marijuana, fighting cancer or cleaning up beaches.

In all, the Register called 348 registered Republicans in central Orange County and reached 90 of them. Of those, only 16 said they wanted to be Republicans. The rest told stories of fast-talking petitioners, some advertising free sunglasses if they signed.

All of the voters identified by the Register are listed as under 28 years old; many said they knew little about politics or voting. A few, when told they were listed on the county voter rolls as a Republican, asked, “What is a Republican?”

The voters are all residents of the 34th State Senate District in central Orange County, where the Republican Party has high hopes of ousting incumbent Democrat Lou Correa in the fall. Unlike the Democrats, the California Republican Party has a controversial policy of paying signature gatherers who sends them new GOP voter registration cards and the Republicans are offering as much as $8 for each new GOP registration in that district.

Many believe the $8 “bounty” gives petitioners an incentive to commit fraud.

In 2006, The Register found a similar fraud pattern in Orange County that was blamed, in part, on the bounty paid to signature gatherers. That year 167 voters complained to election officials that they were switched to Republican registration without their permission; The Register found another 112 voters who said they were tricked. Eleven signature gatherers were eventually convicted of falsifying registrations and other charges; eight went to jail.

The Republican Party isn’t likely to benefit from this scheme because many of the voters contacted by the Register said they don’t vote Republican. The only beneficiaries appear to be the signature gatherers themselves.

“I’m already anti-Republican and now they have people scamming people just to get money and just to get more voters?” said 25-year-old Bobbi Lee Smart, who says she was tricked into registering to vote as a Republican by a signature gatherer at Cypress College. “You guys suck.”

Four signature gatherers reached by The Register denied any wrongdoing. But a spokesman for the California Republican Party said it is taking the Register’s findings seriously and has launched an extensive, internal review to see what happened.

“The CRP has its most robust voter registration verification program in its history going on right now,” said Mark Standriff, communications director for the California Republican Party. “We are committed to accountability and transparency throughout the process… Even one (bad registration) is not acceptable.”

Who are the signature gatherers? Using the affidavit numbers on each voter registration card, the Register traced the fraudulent registrations to at least 17 different petitioners, many of whom were employed by vendors with ties to the California Republican Party.

Nine of those signature gatherers – Patrick Smith of Irvine, Andrew Ernst of Orange, Riley Youngdahl of San Clemente, Eduardo Roman of Aliso Viejo, Daniel Anthony of Rosemead, Louise Breneiser of Glendora, Ryan Kevane of Anaheim Hills, Eric Houskeeper of Laguna Beach and Helene Stanton – signed for 53 of the fraudulent registration cards identified by the Register, certifying they were present when the voters filled them out.

Three signature gatherers identified by the Register – Stanton, Glenda Bittner and Desia Ritson – worked for JSM, an Orange County-based signature gathering firm.

The Register tried to contact all 17 of the signature gatherers, but most calls weren’t returned. Some listed apparently inaccurate addresses on registration paperwork; others had no listed or working phone number. The four signature gatherers that The Register interviewed said they did not register anyone Republican who didn’t want to be.

“You didn’t find anything like that from me,” said Breneiser, who signed five of the cards identified by the voters as fraudulent. “They asked to be registered Republican. … I did nothing wrong.”

Zac Duardo of Los Angeles, who signed three of the cards identified by voters as fraudulent, said it’s the voters’ problem if they’re registered to vote for the wrong party.

“I can tell you that half the people out there don’t know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat,” he said. “Everything I do is legit.”

JSM owner Jenny Breslin said her company “has never participated in anything dishonest or wrong.” She described the signature gatherers as “independent contractors” and said, “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.” Breslin said only Stanton remains with the company and defended her as honest.

“Helene would never do such a thing,” Breslin said. “She doesn’t do that.”

Breslin said she didn’t have any way to help the Register contact Stanton or Ritson, both of whom list only JSM’s office phone as their contact information.

A spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s office declined to comment on the Register’s findings or the complaints already filed. Dan Jacobson, chairman of the Democratic Foundation of Orange County, called on the GOP to take action to stop the fraud.

“This fraud is more than just a cynical, unpatriotic attack on democracy. It appears to be down right criminal,” said Jacobson, a lawyer. “The Republican establishment itself must take ownership of this problem and end the fraud. Silence from the Republican establishment condones this fraud.”

Orange County Republican Party Chairman Scott Baugh said: “I’m saddened to know this has happened again. I hope the culprits are caught and put in jail. This is of no benefit to the Republican Party or democracy.”

Misleading tactics

The Register spoke with voters who shop at Target, Food 4 Less, Wal-Mart and Albertsons; voters who attend Cypress College, Golden West College, Orange Coast College, Santa Ana College, Santiago College, Fullerton College, Irvine Valley College, Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine; voters who assert their political views and voters who aren’t even sure what a party is. But nearly everyone interviewed by the Register told a variation of the same bait-and-switch story:

They were rushing to class or heading to their car or on their way to the store when a signature gatherer stopped them and asked if they’d like to sign a petition. Harried but wanting to help, they listened to the pitch, liked what they heard and signed – and then watched as the petitioner produced more papers to fill out. Now suddenly faced with more to sign, they scribbled their information as fast as they could, many failing to notice that they were filling out a voter registration card.

Some voters told the Register they specifically remember marking themselves as something other than a Republican. Others say the petitioner told them they had to check Republican in order for their signature to count, or because Republicans were sponsoring their signature gathering or for some other vaguely official-sounding reason.

In some cases, voters were told marking Republican didn’t change their actual voter registration. Others were told they could always change back. A few even said they didn’t know they were signing official documents of any kind – they said the signature gatherers made off like they were students, collecting signatures for a class project.

“I remember he said I would not be registered to vote as a Republican. I wouldn’t sign it until he said that,” said Rebecca Hyatt of Westminster, a self-described “liberal” who said she signed a petition on the campus of Golden West College.

A few days later, the 19 year old got a letter in the mail saying she was a Republican.

“What the F?” Hyatt said she thought. “I don’t like the whole Republican thing.”

Twenty-six-year-old Daniel Taai of Santa Ana, who considers himself a Democrat, was unaware he was registered to vote as a Republican.

“Dang! I had no idea,” he said when he was informed by a Register reporter. “It’s like someone hitting you from the back. It’s blindsiding, you know?”

Taai said he was signing up for classes and buying books at Santa Ana College when a signature gatherer approached him.

“He just told me it’s something concerning the school. … We need to get more money for the school,” he said. “Something like that. That’s why I signed it.”

When it came time to mark Republican or Democrat, Taai said the signature gatherer told him, “Oh, don’t worry about that.”

“This teaches me a lesson not to sign any more papers,” he said.

Briseira Gomez, 18, says she was hurrying into Albertsons to cash her student loan check when she was stopped by a signature gatherer circulating some kind of petition about animals. She was vague on the details.

“I was like, ‘Animals? I like animals,'” she said. “I didn’t take time to ask questions about what it was. I was like, ‘Lemme sign, get out of here.’ “

She too ended up on the voter registration rolls as a Republican, even though she didn’t know what a Republican was. When told the Republicans are the party of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, she groaned.

“I want to be for Obama!” she said.

A Simple Solution

For years, the Democrat-controlled State Legislature has tried to outlaw the practice of offering bounties for voter registration cards, but Republicans in the Legislature – and one in the governor’s office – have stood in its way.

Since the beginning of 2005, Democrats have introduced at least four bills to outlaw bounties for voter registration cards and/or petition signatures and of those not one received a single Republican vote approving it. At least twice bills outlawing bounties have made it out of the Legislature anyway, but both times Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed them.

“With this particular system, the incentives are there for petitioners to incorrectly or fraudulently submit voter registration materials without the voter’s knowledge,” said R. Michael Alvarez, a Caltech professor of political science and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. “Clearly, if we could eliminate these bounties, it would eliminate the incentive.”

But Baugh, the Orange County Republican Party chairman, said just because bad people abuse the system doesn’t mean the system should be shut down. When fraud like this happened four years ago, signature gatherers were prosecuted. That’s how the system should be kept in check, he said.

“If somebody robs a bank, you don’t shut down the bank,” he said. “You prosecute the bank robbers.”

Contact the writer: 916-449-6046 or bjoseph@ocregister.com