The Voter Fraud Fraud

Claims that ACORN is destroying democracy are bullshit.

by Tom Namako

debunkings

Evan M. Lopez

Earlier this month, CNN dispatched reporter Drew Griffin, from the station's "special investigations unit," to Philadelphia to look into allegations of voter registration fraud that were gaining attention on the presidential campaign trail. In his piece, which included B-roll from City Hall and two aired interviews, Griffin told anchor Kyra Phillips that 1,500 registration forms, all submitted by the community organizing group ACORN, had been turned over to federal prosecutors for investigation.

"The problem is, Kyra, the volume of bad registrations are getting hard to detect now, for these overworked county and city employees," Griffin said. "They can't read them out fast enough before the deadline to get these voter cards out. So, voter registration fraud can lead to voter fraud."

"Great investigation, Drew," Phillips responded.

The story aired on Oct. 14, and some version of it was repeated for the next five days. In the meantime, the issue picked up speed — and hysteria. At the final presidential debate on Oct. 15, Sen. John McCain, sitting a few feet away from Sen. Barack Obama, said ACORN was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

That legitimized the issue enough for the Pennsylvania Republican party, which filed suit against ACORN in state court, joining Republican parties in several other states. Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Robert Gleason, also one of the plaintiffs in the suit, said in the filing that the next president could "be determined by illegal ballots."

In a matter of weeks, ACORN went from being another advocacy group — it lobbies on behalf of poor people — to the scourge of democracy. Never mind the polls and approval ratings; the Democrats are stealing the 2008 election through one group's fraudulent voter registrations. But there's a problem: Though ACORN has been legitimately criticized in the past for the way it collects new voter registrations, the idea that it has compromised this year's electoral process is, simply, false.

The first argument against ACORN is one that no one disputes: Its voter registration drives put stress on the system that is supposed to weed out registration fraud.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Across the country, ACORN claims to have helped register 1.3 million voters, with about 85,000 of those in Philly, most of whom are minority or low-income. (Of course, this demographic is the GOP's worst nightmare; it's like telling Democrats that a million new evangelicals were registered right before the 2004 presidential election.) "We haven't seen this many new registrations since Frank Rizzo versus Wilson Goode," says Fred Voigt, a deputy city commissioner.

To do this, ACORN pays employees, mostly drawn from the low-income, minority communities it serves, about $8 to $10 an hour. Many do honest work, but some will simply fill out fraudulent information. Still, ACORN has to hand every registration form in to county election officials (so that it can't selectively discard registrations — like, say, from Republicans). And in Philadelphia, any form that seems suspect — like if numerous signatures seem to be in the same handwriting — ACORN marks with a note.

Election officials then vet these registrations. They send confirmation cards to voters whose information has changed, investigate suspicious addresses, and enter each voter's information into a database. Philadelphia City Commissioners chairwoman Margaret Tartaglione lamented at a recent meeting that "our workers are putting in 12-hour days, seven days a week." This is their job, but it's true that the state-mandated computer system database, SURE, is prone to crashing, and workers get little sleep when this happens.

Zack Stalberg, president of the election watchdog group Committee of Seventy, says a flood of registrations can have an effect. "I don't feel a whole lot of pain for the bureaucrats, but, put it this way: If I registered by the deadline and my registration is kosher, but it still has to fight its way through a slow system because many others aren't kosher, that's an obvious problem."

So ACORN creates an inconvenience. But false registrations don't equal false votes, and in a recent interview, Voigt said that every voter who should be on the rolls will be. "[ACORN] made it a close call," he says, "but we have supplemental pages. Everyone should be on the rolls."

That should have ended the hysteria. Yet ACORN opponents like the Pennsylvania GOP are still alleging intentional fraud. With coordinated effort, says state GOP communications director Michael Barley, someone could register as a voter at an abandoned house, go back to answer mail from the city's election commission, and then vote by absentee ballot or actually show up at the polls.

Voigt says this is possible, "but it's very unlikely. You'd need the bodies to do that. It'd have to be a conspiracy." What's more, when first-time voters actually show up at the polls, they have to show identification — anything from a driver's license to a utility bill — in order to cast a ballot.

The GOP isn't confident those checks are happening, says Barley, which is one reason the lawsuit was filed. "I absolutely think a few fraudulent votes most certainly can swing this election," he says.

The last few times ACORN tried to, as it were, "steal" an election, it failed miserably. Take an investigation by local prosecutors in King County, Wash., in 2007. Officials said ACORN submitted about 1,800 fraudulent registrations over the span of two elections. But "only six people associated with the 1,800 registrations submitted by ACORN had actually voted," according to a statement.

Six ACORN workers were later charged with submitting the fraudulent registrations. Prosecutors said in a statement that there wasn't a conspiracy to defraud the system, and that "it was hardly a sophisticated plan: The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets looking for unregistered voters."

Also in 2007, federal law enforcement officials charged four ACORN canvassers with handing in fraudulent registrations in Kansas City, Mo. All four were convicted of submitting a small number of false registrations. (No adjudicated cases involving ACORN or ACORN associates have been prosecuted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.)

The idea of voter fraud is, of course, unacceptable, says Lorraine C. Minnite, professor of political science at Barnard College. But by the end of Election Day, groups like ACORN won't have any significant impact on who determines the next president. "In terms of outcome," she says, "when it's all said and done, there's a minimal-to-zero threat."

(tom.namako@citypaper.net)