I missed the original report last week but was a little surprised that Mark Jacoby, who ran a business that focused on increasing Republican voter registration, plead guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced for filing a "false" voter affidavit in Los Angeles when he actually lived elsewhere.  The two concepts of "domicile" and "residence" that appear in the California Elections Code have always had a little fuzzy correlation, allowing some wiggle room, but with the heat on ACORN and other liberal groups for vote related fraud issues across the country, last fall in the closing weeks of the 2008 general election, Jacoby became sort of a "fall guy" for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and Secretary of State Debra Bowen.  The back story is officials employed a fleet of local police squad cars to arrest this fellow at a temporary residence in the Inland Empire, creating a prosecutorial media event in late October.  And the irony was that amid national claims against liberal groups for fudging the election for Obama, that California was prosecuting a Republican on seemingly similar claims.

     Claims were that Jacoby and his company were changing registrations of Democrats and others to Republican without their knowledge.   Of course, it is important to actually read what you sign, and it is hard to be duped into registering in the wrong party if one makes even a casual perusal of the fairly simple voter registration form, before signature.  Jacoby’s crime wasn’t registering a dead person, or trying to vote a dead person’s registration, or even trying to stop someone from voting (he was actually facilitating that).   Instead, he was prosecuted for changing his own voter registration in California to an address that really wasn’t his permanent residence, which made his witnessing of the registration changes technically illegal.

     Jacoby got three years probation and 30 days of community service in a plea deal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.