Remember Sproul & Associates?

You know, the Arizona-based consulting firm that conducted voter registration drives around the US in 2004 and was accused in some places of destroying Democratic registrations and in others of changing them to Republican registrations, without the voters' consent.

Well, back in July Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas published a story, little discussed in the blogosphere, detailing how the RNC paid Sproul $8 million and then tried to hide it.

Election Fraud: Team Bush Paid $8 Million for Dirty Tricks to Suppress Votes - and Tried to Hide It

By Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas
The Baltimore Chronicle

Wednesday 13 July 2005

In the months before the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group - run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party - had been hired by the Republican National Committee.

Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.

The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states - and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in "conspiracy theory."

It seems that Sproul did quite a lot of work for the Republicans. Exactly how much did he do? More specifically, how much did the RNC pay Sproul & Associates?

If you went online last week to look up how much money Sproul received from the Republicans in 2004, you would have found that, according to the party (whose figures had been posted by the Center for Responsive Politics), the firm was paid $488,957.

In fact, the RNC paid Sproul a great deal more than that. From an independent study of the original data filed by the Republicans with the Federal Election Commission, it is clear that Sproul was paid a staggering $8.3 million for its work against the Democrats.

(Read the whole thing.)