Republicans in several states are dumping a voter-registration firm after discovering that the company submitted bogus forms in Florida. ---

According to Reuters correspondent David Adams, "Election officials in Florida were scouring their records for fraudulent voter-registration forms on Friday." 

Yes, Republicans are shocked, shocked, that this sort of thing could happen in a swing state like Florida -- or possibly in other swing states such as Nevada, Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina, where Strategic Allied Consulting (SAC) has also been hired to recruit conservative voters.

So, let's get this straight:

1. Despite the fact that real incidents of individual voter fraud have (until now) been so rare in the U.S. as to be practically nonexistent, Republicans are desperate to give the false impression that voter fraud is a problem in order to justify their voter-suppression efforts in swing states.

2. So then, a Virginia firm gets money from the Republicans, and -- surprise, surprise -- suddenly commits hundreds of acts of voter fraud! Now, Republicans are acting all outraged and, of course, dragging that old ACORN chestnut into the fray. Golly-gee-willikers, that election-fraud stuff must really be a bigger problem than we thought! Maybe we'd better ID every black person, Latino, or anybody else who doesn't look -- you know, just right -- who dares wander into a polling location?

3. The self-generated Republican controversy originates in Florida, where the GOP enjoys a proud tradition of electoral misconduct. Sunshine State Republicans were so quick to repudiate the fraud -- which, after all, they paid for, and benefited their own party -- one wonders why they could not have acted with similar alacrity in 2000, when they might have prevented the travesty that was the George W. Bush election.

Does any of this smell fishy to you? Because it smells positively elephanty to me. 

4. Sure, it's possible that Strategic Allied Consulting is such a reputable old firm that the GOP was fully justified in entrusting SAC with all its recruiting efforts in five important swing states. Except SAC is not a reputable old firm -- it was incorporated in June 2012 by Arizona-based Nathan Sproul, whose other consulting company, Lincoln Strategy Group, received $70,000 from the Mitt Romney campaign during the 2012 Republican primaries. The Los Angeles Times reports that Sproul "said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the Republican National Committee because of the bad publicity stemming from the past allegations. In 2004, there were allegations in states such as Nevada and Oregon that employees of his firm -- which had a similar contract with the RNC -- registered Democratic voters and then destroyed their forms. (Sproul noted that no criminal charges were ever filed.)"

5. And just take a look at SAC's website -- such professionalism! Why wouldn't you entrust your entire political party's recruitment campaign to this company?

Smelling elephanty yet?

Republicans are too vain to ever admit they were wrong, and too lazy to search out better solutions to America's problems. They just want to win because, in their hearts, they believe they know better than the majority of us stupid American voters. The GOP, realizing that Americans are no longer enthralled by its failed policies, is, as usual, resorting to desperate, underhanded tactics. (This particular scheme -- involving a made-up company secretly hired to commit voter fraud so as to drum up support of the party's voter-suppression campaign -- is so convoluted and Byzantine, I suspect it can only be a plot hatched by Utah's favorite cabal-master Karl Rove).

So, in the weeks to come, we can look forward to renewed dirty tricks on behalf of Republicans eager to thwart President Barack Obama's solid lead. By now, voter suppression is such a transparent tactic as to be useless. The exciting thing will be to watch and see what they will come up with next!