Thursday, October 15, 2009

FieldWorks has resigned from the Ohio Jobs and Growth Campaign

Release:
FieldWorks has resigned from the Ohio Jobs and Growth Campaign.

FieldWorks was hired to canvass Ohio voters and last weekend discovered that one of its many temporary employees appeared to be committing fraud on Vote by Mail applications in Ohio.

Evidence was gathered quickly to hand over to authorities and the employee was terminated. Since that time, FieldWorks has continued to work aggressively with law enforcement and prosecutors to identify any other possible forgery or fraudulent behavior with other canvassers around the state.

This activity appears to be isolated to a handful of the nearly 200 temporary FieldWorks employees who have been working in Ohio. It also applies to only a very small percentage of the many thousands of VBM applications that have been processed in Ohio. The activity only involved absentee ballot applications and not any ballots themselves.

FieldWorks has zero tolerance for any type of fraudulent conduct in the electoral process. Fieldworks is greatly concerned about the motive behind this conduct because employees had no financial incentive per application that would cause them to falsify absentee ballot applications. It was made clear to employees prior to working in Ohio that falsification of applications is a felony.

Because the investigation is ongoing, FieldWorks resigned from the campaign.

The Ohio Jobs and Growth Committee absolutely had no role in hiring or supervising the FieldWorks temporary employees, nor any involvement in any of the fraudulent conduct that may have been conducted by these employees.

FieldWorks has been fully cooperative with law enforcement from the start of their investigation and has helped to identify the sources of these problems.

FieldWorks will of course continue to cooperate with authorities in any way possible.