GOP House candidate was a Dem in Fla.

A Republican legislative candidate who has been criticized for being registered as a Democrat as recently as April has acknowledged he never was registered as a Republican.

Voter registration forms from Hillsborough County in Florida, where District 6 Republican House candidate Tony Bouie had lived while playing football for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, show Bouie registered as a Democrat there in 1996 and never changed. The documents were provided by Carl Seel, one of his opponents in the Republican primary.

Last week, Bouie told Arizona Capitol Times he had been "a Republican half of my voting life" in response to criticisms from Seel, who referred to Bouie as "a 5-day Republican" in a campaign mailer.

But Bouie said the issue was not a big deal and Seel and his supporters are "making a bigger stink out of it than it is."

"I don't think I lied at all," he said. "The fact that I have been Republican over half my voting life is true – I just never changed my paperwork … The fact that I didn't fill out the correct paperwork wasn't that big of a deal to me, because my values are my values. I am who I am."