PITTSBURGH – Four former Pittsburgh-area ACORN workers will face trial on charges they forged or otherwise illegally solicited voter registration cards before the November election.
One worker waived his right to a preliminary hearing on charges he forged 30 cards using bogus names or other fake information, allegedly to meet a 20-card-per-day quota. Voter registration canvassers can be paid an hourly wage in Pennsylvania, but quotas are illegal.
A district judge found sufficient evidence to hold three others for trial on charges of fudging a total of eight cards between them.
Public defender Alan Skwarla doesn’t deny his three clients helped fill out the cards in question, but said there was no proof that they were responsible for the forged portions.
“Anything could have happened at any point of the process, from beginning to end,” Skwarla said. “All three are looking forward to vindicating themselves at trial.”
One of the allegations against Skwarla’s clients involves a single card turned in by a government worker who tried to catch ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, in the act.
An Allegheny County elections office worker, Denise Halliburton, testified she filled out an ACORN card in July. Halliburton said she purposely didn’t sign the card or give her Social Security number because she heard ACORN workers sometimes illegally filled in missing information.
“I just wanted to see if they’d put a forgery on it,” Halliburton testified.
ACORN officials filed the card. A few weeks later, a co-worker showed Halliburton the card, which by then had a signature and a Social Security number that wasn’t Halliburton’s, she said.
The canvasser who turned the card in, Alexis Givner, 23, of West Mifflin, rapidly nodded her head as Skwarla suggested on crossexamination that somebody else at ACORN or at the county elections office added the signature and Social Security number.
ACORN has also come under scrutiny for registration irregularities in other states.
A St. Louis ACORN worker is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to mail fraud for submitting false voter registrations, and a grand jury in Cleveland has charged a man with registering to vote nine times last year using bogus names and addresses on cards ACORN collected.
In Nevada, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, has charged ACORN itself and two supervisors with requiring illegal quotas of 20 cards per shift and firing workers who didn’t meet them.
ACORN officials have denied using quotas and claim they’re being victimized by unscrupulous workers who were generally paid $8 to $10 an hour.
Ian Phillips, legislative director for Pennsylvania ACORN, said Zappa’s charges stem from 216 questionable cards the organization itself flagged. County officials would not comment on that claim.
“What it looks like to us from the outside to us is these people obviously committed crimes and they’re trying to shift the blame,” Phillips said.
