The Republican National Committee has fired a controversial consulting firm it was paying millions of dollars to conduct voter registration in five battleground states, NBC News has learned.

The move came after the Palm Beach County, Fla., elections supervisor discovered 108 potentially fraudulent registration forms submitted by the GOP consulting firm, including suspected phony signatures and home addresses that matched those of a gas station, a medical building, and a Land Rover automotive dealership.

NBC News has learned that four other Florida counties have also reported hundreds of possible fraudulent registration forms submitted by the firm, including apparent dead people being registered as new voters.

Prosecutors in two counties are investigating possible voter fraud by the GOP consulting firm, officials said.

Like Acorn, any assurances that they've handled the situation are falling on deaf ears:

Late Thursday afternoon, Strategic Allied Consulting posted on its website a statement from its lawyer:

"Strategic has a zero tolerance policy for breaking the law. Accordingly, once we learned of the irregularities in Palm Beach County, we were able to trace all questionable cards to one individual and immediately terminated our working relationship with the individual in question. Strategic is committed to following the letter of the law and will continue to cooperate with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections to ensure that this issue is resolved."

But they did the right thing. It just goes to show that individual employees can ruin the reputation of a firm.

Only after the matter had been handed over to the State Attorney did they fire them (aren't they supposed to verify first?).

And, this wasn't the first incident either:

GOP Voter Registration Firms Turn In Thousands Of Invalid Registration Forms:

According to a report today from Sacramento ABC affiliate News10 [see video posted below], a private, for-profit firm calling itself Momentum Political Services, hired by the local Republican Party "to boost GOP registration ranks in key battleground communities" has turned in more than 3,100 invalid voter registration cards during their recent drive.

[UPDATE 5/7/12: According to Sacramento Bee's 5/5/12 report, the number of bad registration forms is much higher than 3,100. The paper reports that since September, out of some 31,000 cards turned in by Momentum Political Services, "at least one-fourth of them have been thrown out because of inaccuracies," according to the Sacramento Registrar of Voters. That puts the questionable registrations from the GOP's company at more than 7,500.]

[...]

The charges of serial voter registration fraud sound very similar to those leveled in 2008 against another outfit hired by the California State GOP to register Republican voters before that year's Presidential election. In that case, the head of the firm was arrested, and eventually pleaded guilty to voter registration charges himself.

In 2006, another firm hired by the CA Republican Party turned in thousands of registration forms with fake names and an error rate as high as 60 percent. And in 2004, a firm hired by the GOP was investigated in a number of states for shredding Democratic voter registrations and tossing them into dumpsters. Despite those allegations, the same folks were later hired by the McCain/Palin campaign in 2008 to run voter registration drives before the Presidential election.

Those are (just?) the ones that were caught.

I know you want to be fair and balanced but......The firm was under investigation for voter fraud and you give them 2 million to do voter registrations. This sounds to me like "You knew I was a snake when you took me in".

Read the attached of how NOT innocent they were. They tried got caught now they want to claim they are taking the high road. Yeah right.

Yeah, earth-shaking when a minor amount happens on the Dem. side. No big deal when the Repubs. are guilty of it in large numbers and over and over again. Yeah, no double standard there!

I do understand now why conservatives/Repubs are so concerned about all the fraud and corruption out there.

in 2004, a firm hired by the GOP was investigated in a number of states for shredding Democratic voter registrations

In 2006, another firm hired by the CA Republican Party turned in thousands of registration forms with fake names and an error rate as high as 60 percent.

In 2008... the head of the firm [hired by Repubs.] was arrested, and eventually pleaded guilty to voter registration charges himself.

In 2012...the questionable registrations from the GOP's company at more than 7,500

They just failed to tell us that it was REPUBLICAN FRAUD AND CORRUPTION, not Dem. misbehavior, that they were concerned about.

But then, trying to find Republican Fraud and corruption in Acorn (and failing to find any there) was the wrong place to look, wasn't it. It was all in their own voter registration firms!

Kate

In all 234 counties of Texas, the entire states of Hawaii and Oklahoma, half of Washington and Colorado, and certain counties in swing state Ohio, votes will be cast on eSlate and ePollbook machines made by Hart Intercivic.

Hart Intercivic machines have famously failed in Tarrant County (Ft. Worth), adding 10,000 non-existant votes. The EVEREST study, commissioned by the Ohio secretary of state in 2007, found serious security flaws with Hart Intercivic products.

Looking beyond the well-documented Google choking laundry list of apparent fraud, failure and seeming corruption that is associated with Hart Intercivic, an ongoing Free Press investigation turned its attention to the key question of who owns the voting machine companies. The majority of the directors of Hart come from the private equity firm H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. has been heavily invested in Hart Intercivic since July 2011, just in time for the current presidential election cycle. But who is H.I.G Capital?

Out of 49 partners and directors, 48 are men, and 47 are white. Eleven of these men, including H.I.G. Founder Tony Tamer, were formerly employed at Bain and Company, and two of those men, John P. Bolduc, Douglas Berman, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.

H.I.G. Capital employees have given $338,000 to Mitt Romney's campaign. That amounts to over $1500 per employee. Bain Capital, Mitt's former company, by comparison, only gave him $268,000. H.I.G. is the 11th largest donor to the Romney Campaign. Clearly they are working really hard for their man. It appears that they will work even harder on election night.

Although not boisterously promising to deliver states where their machines are to Romney as Wally O'Dell of Diebold did for Bush in 2004, they can launder hundreds of thousands of votes and swing the vote in the crucial swing state Ohio.

Privatized election counting? Are you folks kidding me?

However, when you own, or have a vested interest in the corporations that count your votes, it's pretty much in the bag...

Why aren't companies or their subsidiaries, owned or of interest to candidates, NOT eligible to provide these direct services of vote counting?

This should be of major interest, major concern, to Democrats and to the legal system at large.

Any connection to these electronic vote counting machines or the corporations that manufacture them, and their software, should be investigated prior to an election cycle, and not allowed to participate.

I'm of the opinion that we should go back to paper ballots. It's a lot harder to cheat that way.

They've made quite a damning case for voting fraud against the Republican party.

Power corrupts.... absolutely power absolutely corrupts.

Votes only matter in Colorado and Ohio. Texas and Oklahoma will go for Romney. If Hawaii and Washington turn up for Romney then everyone will smell a rat.

I keep repeating myself, I know. This has been going on for decades. Take a very close look at ALL Red States.