In the past few years, left-leaning third-party advocacy groups have made voter registration a priority, and they've launched unprecedented efforts to sign people up for the polls. Though nominally nonpartisan and not affiliated with the Democratic Party in any official capacity, nobody doubts that the efforts of these groups -- such as the real America Votes, which works together with America Coming Together (ACT) and the Media Fund -- are meant to bolster Kerry in November. So how is Sproul's work different? Why is it wrong when Sproul asks its workers to focus on Republicans in the same way that America Votes might ask its workers to canvass a historically Democratic neighborhood?

Those are the questions the RNC asks in attacking Democrats "whose selective outrage does not apply to Democrat aligned groups like ACT, ACORN and others despite widespread allegations of systematic voter registration fraud." And in fact, the Republicans are right that some progressive groups have been accused of registration mischief. On Oct. 11, for instance, a local television news show in Denver reported that employees for ACORN, a group that has focused on registering low-income minorities, say they've been registering the same people multiple times in order to get paid more than once. (ACORN says that it's investigating the claims and notes that, logically, it doesn't have an interest in paying employees extra for registering the same people more than once.)

But former employees and others who've dealt with Sproul say its efforts go beyond the line of acceptable party boosterism sometimes seen in voter registration efforts. The firm's tactics are systematically deceptive, they say; lying seems to be part of its normal business plan. When you tell people you're doing a poll but you aren't really doing a poll, you're lying to them. The established left-leaning groups say they'd never engage in such a practice -- and so far, there's no evidence they have engaged in it.

The yarn that Sproul concocted for librarians around the country during the summer is another example of the company's uneasy relationship with truth. One of these librarians is Meghan O'Flaherty, the central library manager of the Jackson County Library in Oregon, who received a solicitation letter from Sproul in early September. "Our firm has been contracted to help coordinate a national non-partisan voter registration drive, America Votes!, in several states across the nation," the letter began. It went on to ask permission to have "1 to 2 people assigned to register voters" outside the library.

When she got the letter, O'Flaherty looked online for more information about America Votes, and after calling the group she discovered that the real America Votes wasn't connected with Sproul's firm. "I do feel they were trying to deceive me," she says now. Flaherty posted her findings on a librarian's listserv, and when her story was reported in the local paper on Sept. 21, Nathan Sproul professed innocence. "We were not trying to copy their name," he told the paper, saying that he'd never before heard of the large, well-funded America Votes.

Holly McCullough, the special assistant to the director of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, also received a solicitation from Sproul & Associates in September. McCullough and other librarians in the region initially let the firm conduct registration at the libraries. When library patrons began complaining about the Sproul workers' tactics, though, she called the company and complained. In response, the firm told her some outlandish stories.

Sproul first said that workers had been asking people their political affiliations "because they were doing some market analysis in the area," McCullough says. "I told them they were only supposed to be doing registrations, not market analysis. So then they said they were having trouble with temp agency they were using: the temp workers weren't working according to the rules. In my last conversation with them I asked them who they're associated with -- are you really with America Votes? They put me on hold. Then they came back and said, 'We've always represented that we were Sproul, and America Votes is a non-partisan group we're working with.' But then they said, 'There is another, partisan America Votes, and we're not affiliated with them.'" McCullough asked the firm to cease its operations at her library.

Despite the recent chatter among librarians and some former employees about Sproul's practices, the various threads of the Sproul story weren't pulled together until Eric Russell, a 26-year-old in Las Vegas, came forward last week with his explosive account. Russell, who has acknowledged a beef with the firm over pay, told his local CBS affiliate that supervisors at the company routinely discarded Democratic registration forms. The station, KLAS 8, managed to fish some from the trash, and when it contacted the affected voters they were, understandably, shocked.

Republicans have responded by questioning Russell's motives and his political affiliation. "There's no way to prove what he says either way. He's a disgruntled employee who had access to those forms. There's no way to prove he didn't tear them up," says Brian Scroggins, chairman of the Clark County Republican Party. "I was told he had a prime seat at the Michael Moore event the other day," Scroggins added. According to a report in the Arizona Republic on Friday, Nathan Sproul responded to Russell's allegations by filing a defamation lawsuit against him. "The lawsuit claims that after Russell was fired, he returned to the office holding what appeared to be voter registration forms and told workers he would claim that he saw a supervisor tear up the forms unless he was paid what he wanted," the paper said.

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