The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Conspiracy is in the details, but nobody likes details.

    By erica20 on Fri, 04/12/2013 - 3:39pm |

    I’ve been following the story of Colin Small, a young Republican who was seen throwing out completed voter registration forms in Harrisonburg, VA, and got arrested for it. Turns out Small was employed by the oft-renamed firm sometimes and formerly known as Strategic Allied Consultants, sometimes and formerly run by disgraced Republican consultant Nathan Sproul.

    http://www.wtsp.com/news/national/article/278836/81/Man-arrested-for-tos...

    Allegations have been made, predictably, that Small’s act was part of a larger Strategic Allied conspiracy, but no solid proof has emerged. Small’s bosses fired him and offered the usual “bad apple” explanation.

    In addition, a rather weak explanation for Small’s behavior was offered up by an “unnamed source close to the story” who said Small panicked because he couldn't file the forms by the deadline, and solved his problem by ditching them.

    http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/10/19/colin-sm...

    As a practical matter, the unnamed source’s explanation doesn’t hold up. Small ditched the forms early in the day, not at the last moment, and in any case he could have mailed them in a pinch. Maybe he had made some sort of uncorrectable error and been unable to follow up with the voters in question, but in that case, why not just file the forms anyway, with a note that he just couldn’t contact the voters?

    Normally you’d expect the authorities to investigate this kind of thing, but The Virginia State Board of Elections maintains that since there’s no box for party affiliation on the forms, there’s no indication that Small’s activity was partisan, so they see no need to request an investigation, and therefore, the charges against Small can’t go forward. (Actually, I have to check that. Maybe the criminal charges are still in place.)

    And that is all the information that’s available.

     

    Update: Colin Small's misdemeanor trial for throwing out voter registration forms in Harrisonburg VA is coming up next week. To the best of my knowledge, no one is going to seriously challenge his story that he just got behind on his work and threw those forms away on the last day because, well, because.

    This story does not hold water. But if anyone close to the case wants to establish a link between Small and his bosses' bosses' boss, Nathan Sproul of Voter Registration Hijinks, Incorporated, they would have to do some serious digging on Small himself, on what he was supposed to do with the forms instead of throwing them away, and whether there was a spoken or unspoken policy against a practice that I've dubbed "Acorning," which is submitting bad forms with a note indicating that they might be bad. This is the unfortunate honesty which famously got Acorn into so much trouble.

    That Democrats have satisfied themselves with lazy recriminations of the entire Sproul operation instead of closely examining Small, his ties to extreme-ish Catholic groups, or the paperwork practices at his office, just seems like a real shame to me.

    Comments

    Um, did one of you guys reverse the order of my update/original article?

    Not that I mind, but if you have site elves that sophisticated, I'm a little frightened.


    by erica20 on Fri, 04/12/2013 - 6:35pm

    There must be some gremlins behind the scenes. The other day the "Resistance is futile" message came up for no reason and I havent been able to press enter for a paragraph break and have been unable to paste anything for a few weeks. 


    by Resistance on Fri, 04/12/2013 - 8:51pm

    I'm the elf. We occasionally make minor edits when we put stuff on the front page, usually just grammatical and formatting. I moved the update to the end b/c it didn't make sense if hadn't read the main article first.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 8:44am

    Thank you.

    (I may need to make some additional modifications--the link is old and some details of the story itself need to be updated. But I wanted to get it out there. I so wish that somebody in Harrisonburg would pick this up and really run with it, interviewing co-workers and such.)


    by erica20 on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 11:28am

    I forgot all about this scandal.

    Now I am curious as to how the criminal proceedings progress!

    We took Virginia anyway, right?

    I would bet that more than 8 votes were involved though.


    by Richard Day on Fri, 04/12/2013 - 9:45pm

    For President, yes. But the county prosecutor is a Republican, as is the AG.

    The felony charges against Small, which had to do with disclosing personal information, were dropped. I guess if you put personal information in a dumpster, it's not disclosure!

    Small still has to face the misdemeanor charges. I suspect he will plead guilty, but I sort of wish he wouldn't. I'm pretty sure Small's story, which is that he got flustered on the last day of his job and didn't think he could get the forms filed on time, is a lie. The place where he would have had to file the forms is only a 5 min drive from where he dumped them, and it was still early in the day. Heck, he could have mailed them--it says in the rules that items postmarked before 5 pm that day would be accepted.

    The idea that Small did not know the filing times/policies is not credible. Small is a very bright kid who had worked on campaigns before and was a supervisor in this particular job. And, he was a young politics student at Catholic University of America when the whole ACORN controversy was swirling around the 2008 elections.There is NO WAY that Small did not understand the rules for how to deal with these forms--it would be like a kid who went to college in the 70's not knowing that there was a war in Vietnam!

    I think the key to this case lies in the type of forms these were--and by that I don't mean Republican or Democrat. Small's attorney says they were expired, doubles, or in one case, a form that was mistakenly filled out for a felon. In other words, they were the type of forms that got ACORN into so much trouble. My theory is that there was an unspoken policy that these forms should be quietly disposed of, not filed along with a note that they were spoiled, the way the ACORN forms were.

    Small made it all the way to the last day before finally getting caught disposing of bad forms. But, caught he was, and now he's probably going to walk away by pleading guilty to a minor misdemeanor charge and explain himself by saying that he's the dumbest guy on the face of the Earth.

    At which point, Nathan Sproul will breathe a sigh of relief, because he got away with it again.......


    by erica20 on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 11:24am

    Ok, this is a weird question, but is there any way to force the prosecutor to ask more questions? Or would this be something that another source, like the AG, would have to investigate?


    by erica20 on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 11:25am

    the trial judge can ask, and in some ( few) jurisdictions the members of the jury can submit questions. otherwise, no.

    by jollyroger on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 2:49pm

    That's about right. 

    The recent MSM proceedings concerning the husband killer underline your statement.

    And the Feds can always come in when the State screws up.

    There has to be some basis for Federal Jurisdiction of course in order for further proceedings to proceed.

     

     


    by Richard Day on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 3:26pm

    Are there juries for misdemeanor trials, or just for felonies?

    (A few holes in my legal understanding...)


    by erica20 on Sun, 04/14/2013 - 12:48am

    the defendant can waive a jury, but in most jurisdictions for all but the lowest level misdemeanors the right to a jury is constitutionally guaranteed. police charged with crimes frequently opt for a" bench" trial where the factual issues are left to the judge.

    by jollyroger on Sun, 04/14/2013 - 4:48am