Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.
Advertisement
The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN’s Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.
“There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications,” said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office. “And it appears to be widespread.”
In Cleveland, a month ago, ACORN gets probed over fake voter registrations:
CLEVELAND — A national organization that conducts voter registration drives for low-income people has curtailed its push in Cuyahoga County after the Board of Elections accused its workers of submitting fraudulent registration cards.
The board is investigating the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Results of the inquiry could be turned over to the county prosecutor.
Board employees said ACORN workers often handed in the same name on a number of voter registration cards, but showing that person living at different addresses. Other times, cards had the same name listed, but a different date of birth. Still another sign of possible fraud showed a number of people living at an address that turned out to be a restaurant.
That same story also mentions an investigation in 2006 where 500 possibly fake registration cards were turned over to the county prosecutor. Also in 2006, four ACORN workers were indicted in Kansas City for bogus voter registrations:
ACORN and Project Vote recruit and assign workers to low-income and minority neighborhoods to register people to vote.
The Kansas City Election Board told KMBC they found suspicious forms, such as seven applications from one person and an application for a dead man.
“There is some motive behind it — this is not accidental,” said Ray James with the Kansas City Election Board.
ACORN also got into trouble in Seattle in 2007 where charges were filed over “the worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history of the state of Washington” according to Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed.
The announcement of criminal charges came after the King County Canvassing Board revoked 1,762 allegedly fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN employees.
Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Stephen Hobbs told the board that six ACORN workers had admitted filling out registration forms with names they found in phone books last October. The canvassers filled out the forms while sitting around a table at the downtown Seattle Public Library, Hobbs said.
There are also cases in Colorado, Wisconsin, and Ohio involving Acorn and voter fraud during the past few election cycles. Is it an orchestrated scheme concocted and managed from the top by some nefarious Blofeld-type character? Not likely. It’s likely a distributed effort, where each group operates independently of the others towards the same end-result. Think flash mobs or distributed computing. SETI-at-home, if you will.
But in these instances, the goal is a nefarious one: to overwhelm the voter verification system by producing mounds of bogus entries. It will be impossible to check them all, so some of the fake ones slip by and in elections where the margin is slim, it only takes a few to tip the race.
Can we please have voter-id checks?
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
cforms contact form by delicious:days