AP
Officials: FBI investigates ACORN for voter fraud

Oct 16 01:25 PM US/Eastern
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press Writer Write a Comment





McCain Demands Obama Explain Relationship With ACORN


WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election.
A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation to The Associated Press on Thursday. A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of recent raids on ACORN offices in several states for any evidence of a coordinated national scam.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, says it has registered 1.3 million young people, minorities and poor and working-class voters—most of whom tend to be Democrats.

Republican accusations about the group were raised during Wednesday's presidential debate between Democrat Barack Obama and GOP candidate John McCain.

Some ACORN employees have been accused of submitting false voter registration forms—including some signed `Mickey Mouse' or other fictitious characters.

Those voter registration cards have become the focus of fraud investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least five other states. Election officials in Ohio and North Carolina also recently questioned the group's voter forms.

ACORN has said the "vast majority" of its workers are conscientious, but some might have turned in duplicate applications or provided fake information to pad their pay. Workers caught submitting false information have been fired, ACORN officials say.

ACORN says laws in a number of states require it to submit all registration cards it collects even dubious ones, so its workers segregate applications with missing, suspicious or false information and flag them so state election officials can quickly check them further.

Ohio elections chief appeals court ruling
By Associated Press

POSTED: 08:58 a.m. EDT, Oct 16, 2008

COLUMBUS: Ohio's top elections chief has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in a dispute over whether the state is required to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility, a spokesman for her office said Thursday.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, filed an appeal the high court late Wednesday, said spokesman Jeff Ortega.

On Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the Ohio Republican Party and ordered Brunner to set up a system that provides names of newly registered voters whose driver's license numbers or Social Security numbers don't match records in other government databases.

The GOP contends the information for counties will help prevent fraud.

At least 200,000 newly registered voters have mismatched data, according to an initial review by Brunner's office.

Brunner's office said Wednesday that she would comply with the lower court's ruling. Ortega said the office would release a statement later Thursday on why she chose to file an appeal.

Brunner has called the issue a veiled attempt at disenfranchising voters and said other checks exist to help determine eligibility.

Ohio Republicans issued a statement calling the situation a shameful mess and criticized her for initially saying she would comply with the earlier court ruling.

About 666,000 Ohioans have registered to vote since January, with many doing so before the contested Democratic presidential primary election between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton in March.

COLUMBUS: Ohio's top elections chief has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in a dispute over whether the state is required to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility, a spokesman for her office said Thursday.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, filed an appeal the high court late Wednesday, said spokesman Jeff Ortega.

On Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the Ohio Republican Party and ordered Brunner to set up a system that provides names of newly registered voters whose driver's license numbers or Social Security numbers don't match records in other government databases.

The GOP contends the information for counties will help prevent fraud.

At least 200,000 newly registered voters have mismatched data, according to an initial review by Brunner's office.

Brunner's office said Wednesday that she would comply with the lower court's ruling. Ortega said the office would release a statement later Thursday on why she chose to file an appeal.

Brunner has called the issue a veiled attempt at disenfranchising voters and said other checks exist to help determine eligibility.

Ohio Republicans issued a statement calling the situation a shameful mess and criticized her for initially saying she would comply with the earlier court ruling.

About 666,000 Ohioans have registered to vote since January, with many doing so before the contested Democratic presidential primary election between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton in March.

TalkingPointsMemo wrote:

The Gist of the ACORN Story
10.10.08 -- 2:58PM By Josh Marshall

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.

To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News ...

At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.

But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.

Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.

The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

It's that simple.

Frazzled wrote:Well we'll have to disagree. I think the ACORN thing is a very big deal, regardless of thoughts on the Obama connection. Voter fraud on a multistate scale is a very big deal indeed.

Frazzled wrote:10 states are investigating. FBI is investigating. Thats not "no results."

Voter registration fraud is 1) illegal 2) the attempted part of actual voter fraud. They don't go to that effort just for kicks.

lord_sutekh wrote:If ACORN did wrong, punish those responsible... but don't make the leap from an unaffiliated group to Obama and his campaign. That has about as much relevance as trying to make a bridge between the people who snuck the KKK material into a newspaper and McCain. I mean, the KKK is a right-wing entity, so it MUST be working with the McCain campign and the RNC, right?

Actually it is no results until there are some results from the investigations.

Frazzled wrote:10 states are investigating. FBI is investigating. Thats not "no results."

Frazzled wrote:Voter registration fraud is 1) illegal

Frazzled wrote:2) the attempted part of actual voter fraud. They don't go to that effort just for kicks.

Ahtman wrote:Remember the old Chicago adage? Vote early and often.

lord_sutekh wrote:I'll see humor when there's humor to be had... and there was none there. So back atcha.

Kilkrazy wrote:What's the capital of Iceland?

About £6.50.

Frazzled wrote:
Again I don't understand the defensiveness of the Democrat types on this board. Ohio has had charges of voting irregularities for two elections now by the Democratic party. Its interesting how you immediately "go partisan" when this is a non-partisan issue. As I said, I am sure if McCain wins by a hair the Democratic party will launch thousands of lawyers. If the Republicans lose by a hair this election they will not pull a Nixon but will fight just as hard.

What I am bemoaning is the willful intent to commit voter to "supress the vote" of legal voters versus those who are voting illegally.