Last Thursday a federal grand jury in Kansas City indicted four persons working for the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, accusing them of submitting more than 15,000 voter registration forms with fictitious names, phony signatures and bogus addresses.
ACORN is a liberal advocacy group that claims to speak for the poor and minorities — running these voter registration drives no doubt to prime the pump for an Election Day voter turnout operation that includes multiple voting by the same people at different precincts in a state with a tightly contested Senate race.
But ACORN also runs big-money community development corporations. The federal government supported ACORN housing programs to the tune of $2.6 million in 2003-04. That led Republicans to support efforts to prohibit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from subsidizing ACORN’s voter registration drives.
Democrats resisted Republican efforts to restrict ACORN Housing Corporation funding, arguing that community development could rightly include registering new voters at their new addresses. But Republicans prevailed in adding voter registration restrictions to the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act.
Too many reports of ACORN involvement in voter registration fraud led them to amend the Fannie Mae reform bill to prohibit giving federal housing grants to any group that participated in voter drives.
ACORN’s problem isn’t its attempts to “game the system.” It’s the questionable legality of the tactics they use.
For instance, The Wall Street Journal reported that an Ohio ACORN worker was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent voter registration cards. Many of the newly registered voters were deceased, underage or were named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy or Jive Turkey.
In Minnesota, authorities founds hundreds of voter registration cards in the trunk of a car owned by a former ACORN worker suspected of registering voters twice so he could double his fees.
In Colorado, one woman admitted to a local television station that she was forging names on voter registration cards in order to help her now-convicted boyfriend collect a $50 bounty for newly registered voters. These incidents were widely reported in the 2004 presidential campaign.
We all remember the long voter lines in Ohio in 2004. The problem was so systemic that the House of Representatives held hearings into the possibility of statewide voter disenfranchisement. Local county officials testified that one problem was the practice by ACORN operatives of dropping stacks containing thousands of voter registration forms on county registrar desks just before the voter registration deadline. Officials reported that they were harried and overwhelmed by the practice, which made it harder for them to protect the integrity of the ballot.
There are many other stories of voter registration improprieties by ACORN workers. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee investigations are ongoing, and some workers have been convicted of voter fraud.
Is it a coincidence that in Missouri, site of the current indictments, Democrat Claire McCaskill is in a closely contest Senate race with Republican incumbent Jim Talent? Some 20,000 questionable voter registration forms were turned in by ACORN officials.
Fox News has reported that Kansas City election officials became suspicious of 15,000 registrations when they noticed the name of one person who was registered with the same signature three times under three addresses, social security numbers and birthdays.
The St. Louis Board of Elections is currently investigating another 5,000 questionable registrations submitted by ACORN operatives. These have been turned over to federal investigators from the Justice Department.
Last month, the Missouri state Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a law that required voters to submit photo identification at polling locations. ACORN was a plaintiff behind the challenge to the state law. With 15,000 questionable voter registrations in Kansas City and another 5,000 in St. Louis, ACORN’s involvement should be no surprise.
It is our civic duty to support increased participation in the electoral process. But we also need to protect the integrity of the ballot. ACORN’s well-documented track record should raise the question: Is ACORN disenfranchising the process itself?
Terrence Scanlon is president of the Capital Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.
