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Union-backed voter fraud group for Obama caught lyingOn Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.
The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.
In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly.
“We were wondering how many were Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse,” said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “The group is really tainted, and any work they do is suspect.”
Republicans had been prepared for months to make an issue of Acorn’s registration drive. A year ago, the party’s national committee anticipated the surge of new registrations by putting a map of the country on its Web site, labeled “You Can’t Make This Up! Vote Fraud.”
Democrats and officials with Acorn accuse Republicans of trying to manufacture a controversy to deflect attention from alleged voter suppression activities in several states. Election officials and experts say there is little chance that significant numbers of supporters of either party would actually try to vote through a fraudulent registration.
Over the last few weeks, the Acorn registration drive has become a flash point in the campaign when the flood of new voter registrations prompted complaints from election officials about the high number of improper submissions. State and local officials have begun investigations into possible fraudulent activity in at least 10 states.
If interviews with two dozen voters in the swing states of Florida and Ohio are any indication, Republicans’ efforts appear to have resonated with some members of their own party as well as with some independents and Democrats.
“I’d have to see how bad it is and what happens,” said Dorrie Cohen, an 82-year-old Democrat in Boynton Beach, Fla. “If it’s very organized fraud, I think that I would question the election. If it’s just a few people trying something, I don’t think I would. However, there’s so much on the newspapers and the TV about it, I imagine it will be organized.”
Mr. Slater and Acorn officials have defended their voter registration work. They said that it remained technically difficult to weed out duplications without better access to election records, and that their internal auditing identified many of the fraudulent registrations, which they flagged for election officials to review.
“Everybody knows that when 1.3 million applications are submitted, not every single one of them gets on the rolls,” said Brian Kettenring, a spokesman for Acorn. “That’s common sense.”
The Republican drive to publicize Acorn’s problems has had another less visible impact on the race, shifting the focus of election lawyers in the homestretch to the Nov. 4 election. Much of the Democratic team of lawyers and operatives who had intended to work on monitoring voter rights at the polls has instead played defense the last two weeks, responding to accusations of fraud.
The Obama campaign has also sought to deflect Republican efforts to tie Acorn’s registration campaign to the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. The Republicans highlighted a federal election filing by the Obama campaign that showed an $832,598 payment last February to an Acorn affiliate, Citizens Services Inc., for “staging, sound, lighting.” The Republicans suggested that the payment was actually for voter registration. But the Obama campaign said it had mislabeled the payment, and it filed an amended report that reflects the money was for get-out-the-vote efforts.
In a letter on Thursday to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, the general counsel for the Obama campaign, Robert F. Bauer, said he worried that Republican Party officials or candidates would pressure the Justice Department to improperly involve itself in the election.
Accusations of impropriety by a Republican voter registration campaign surfaced this week in California, where the authorities arrested the owner of a firm hired by the California Republican Party to register voters. Officials said that the owner, Mark Jacoby, fraudulently registered himself at a childhood address to qualify for gathering signatures on petitions and registering voters.
Mr. Jacoby’s firm, Young Political Majors, is also facing accusations of tricking residents into registering as Republicans by having them sign petitions seeking tougher penalties for child molesters.
Mr. Jacoby’s lawyer, Dan Goldfine, said that the charges against his client were “baseless,” and added that although the authorities have been looking into accusations that Mr. Jacoby’s firm improperly registered voters, they did not charge him with those violations.
In June, federal election records show, the California Republican Party paid $175,000 for voter registration work to the firm of a Republican operative, Nathan Sproul, who has been investigated for voter registration fraud in several states. Mr. Sproul could not be reached for comment.
In interviews this week, Acorn officials said they had an extensive program to detect fraudulent applications, which included calling the registrants to verify information provided on the forms. They also said they had combed through electronic records from the group’s field offices across the country, and that their internal audit did not show evidence of pervasive voter registration fraud.
Most of the registrations that were rejected were duplicate forms, followed by incomplete forms. The Acorn officials said their investigation found about 9,000 voter registration cards that were determined to be fraudulent. A lawyer for the group estimated that perhaps 5,000 to 6,000 more cards employees turned in were fraudulent. Acorn officials said that 20 percent to 25 percent of the applications it submitted were likely duplicates, 5 percent were incomplete, and 1 percent to 1.5 percent were fraudulent. Mr. Slater said the estimates were based on past registration drives and a sampling of this one.
Acorn officials said they were unable to provide a state-by-state breakdown identifying where the fraudulent voter registrations were submitted, but a spokesman said that at least some bogus cards cropped up in all 18 states where the group had major registration drives. Acorn conducted smaller drives in three other states.
Mr. Kettenring, the Acorn spokesman, said the number of fraudulent cards did not vary widely from state to state, but he identified Acorn’s office in Gary, Ind., as a particular trouble spot. After Acorn officials identified the percentage of problematic cards to be “unsatisfactorily high,” they shut down the office for three weeks beginning in late August, and brought in new management and canvassers before reopening it.
The group also said it was forced to fire 829 of the 10,000 canvassers it hired during the election for job-related problems, including falsifying registration forms. Acorn officials say they pay canvassers an hourly wage and not by the number of forms they obtain.
Mr. Kettenring said Acorn intended to change the language on its Web site to reflect that 400,000 of the 1.3 million registration submissions would likely be rejected by election officials, but said the group did not intend to be misleading.
In Las Vegas, where state officials raided Acorn offices this month to seize records, the county registrar of voters, Harvard L. Lomax, said his workers had found hundreds of potentially fraudulent registrations beyond those identified by Acorn.
“What this has done is undermined confidence in the system, because voters don’t understand that we have checks and bounds,” Mr. Lomax said. “I’m confident in the integrity of elections here.”
Echoing other election officials, Mr. Lomax said registration fraud could be sharply reduced if registration workers were all volunteers. “I have a solution: Make it illegal to pay people to register to vote,” Mr. Lomax said. “Money is the root of evil.”
But Acorn officials say that paying workers helps their voter registration drives succeed in signing up large numbers of minority and low income voters.
Joseph Hickson, an automobile designer from Naples, Fla., who is registered as a Democrat, said the voter registration issue would be made moot by a large margin of victory for Mr. Obama.
“It really depends on how much of a landslide he has — if he has one,” Mr. Hickson said. “If it’s close there may be some questions.”
(nytimes.com)
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