GOP sound and fury about ACORN is a little bit nutty

In the wake of allegations about the use of foreclosure lists to challenge voters at the polls, the Michigan GOP and the McCain campaign are issuing charges of voter fraud against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national nonprofit group that has been organizing in neighborhoods around the country for years. But a review of the allegations, along with interviews with independent political observers, shows the charges are largely baseless.

The Republican campaign against ACORN in 2008 is part of larger national struggle over voter turnout that has taken on a new intensity in the wake of the 2000 Florida recount, the long lines and delays seen in Ohio in 2004, and the Michigan Messenger’s report on the state GOP’s “lose you house, lose your vote” plans.

Earlier this month, the Michigan GOP sent out a press release citing a Detroit Free Press article that reported large numbers of duplicate and fraudulent voter-registration applications had been submitted by ACORN canvassers in Michigan.

“ACORN has a long track-record of careless disregard of election law and outright voter fraud in Michigan and across the country,” said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saulius “Saul” Anuzis in the statement.

More recently, during a hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee last Wednesday, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) leveled similar allegations at the group, while attempting to tie the charges to Sen. Barack Obama:

“There is one particular organization that is becoming increasingly embroiled in illegal voting activity. That organization is called ACORN,” Franks said. “Presidential candidate Barack Obama is highlighted in this regard. ACORN is one of the organizations he helped organize, and Sen. Obama served as a lawyer for ACORN.”

Finally, in a conference call with reporters on Sept. 22, members of the McCain campaign’s Honest and Open Election Committee — including former Sens. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and John Danforth of Missouri — repeatedly invoked ACORN’s name, claiming that incomplete and duplicate applications from its voter registration drives were “gumming up the system,” and accusing the organization of committing voter fraud by submitting fake applications.

Danforth described his committee’s goal as “ensur[ing] that every voter who is eligible to vote gets to vote and also mak[ing] sure there is no stuffing of ballot boxes, no fraudulent voting.”

ACORN responds, observers weigh in

ACORN runs voter registration drives all over the country and has registered record numbers of voters during its current drive. In Michigan alone, ACORN has registered more than 200,000 new voters this year.

Danforth and other ACORN critics note correctly that a significant number — typically around 30 percent — of those voter registration applications end up being rejected. About 3 percent to 5 percent of the applications collected are rejected because they’re incomplete, and less than 1 percent are deemed illegible. About 25 percent of applications are rejected because they are duplicates.

But the rejection rate is not a sign of wrongdoing, say voting experts.

“We’ve got two sets of problems,” says Mike Slater, executive director of Project Vote, which developed and administers the canvassing and quality control systems used by ACORN. “There are people who don’t believe they’re registered when in fact they are, or who think their registration is not up to date when they are. Then there are people who take pity on a canvasser and decide that they’ll help them out by completing a registration form even though it’s useless.”

The bulk of the duplication problem, Slater says, is “people who decide that it won’t hurt to complete a card, so they’re just gonna go ahead and do it.”

ACORN has a system for weeding out duplicates, which involves scanning applications and submitting them to a database company to compile the data, but the process takes weeks. This method can’t catch duplicates that are submitted within a few days or weeks of each other, he explains.

The charge that ACORN engages in “outright voter fraud” and “illegal voting” activity seems to be based on a handful of cases over many years. For example, three ACORN canvassers pleaded guilty to voter fraud in Seattle in 2007, and eight pleaded guilty to fraud in Missouri in 2004. By comparison, ACORN had thousands of canvassers across the country and more than 100 canvassers working in Michigan alone in these instances.

In one case in 2004, ACORN was sued in a Florida court for voter fraud and filed counter charges of defamation and won. The judge dismissed the initial suit with prejudice and agreed that the allegations of fraud were false and defamatory.

ACORN-related voter fraud in Michigan

No charges of fraud have been reported against ACORN in Michigan, but an unknown number of applications were recently turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Michigan for investigation of possible fraud.

In response to a Michigan Messenger request for specific examples of voter fraud perpetrated by ACORN in the state, a Michigan GOP spokesman sent a fact sheet that made reference to a Detroit Free Press story from 2004 about campaign workers with Project Vote and PIRGIM (Public Interest Research Group in Michigan) who were under investigation for voter registration fraud in four counties. When asked if any convictions resulted from those investigations or if there were any examples of anyone connected with ACORN ever being charged with wrongdoing in Michigan, the spokesman did not respond.

“Voter fraud” as red herring

Gerald Hebert, a retired U.S. Department of Justice voting rights expert who served under Republican and Democratic presidents, says the kind of fraud that the GOP is charging ACORN with — deliberately registering fictitious people or registering the same person in two different precincts — is extremely rare. Hebert is now executive director of the Campaign Legal Center in Washington. The nonprofit organization was founded by Trevor Potter, who represents the McCain campaign in lawsuits over voter suppression.

In the case of ACORN activists convicted of fraud in Missouri, Hebert says ACORN itself had “actually turned those people in to the local district attorney and to the feds, saying these people had been engaging in fictitious registration forms. None of those people actually voted, and none of them even got registered, because ACORN called attention to the fact that these were likely bogus applications.”

Hebert also says that a significant number of “bad” applications are simply the result of the way canvassing operates, not of an intent to inflate the voter rolls.

“It is inevitable that you’re going to have a certain number of applications that come in that are going to have incorrect, incomplete or duplicate information,” he says.

“I don’t think voter fraud is the problem that a lot of people claim it is,” Hebert says. “To the extent that there is any voter fraud, based on my 35 years of practicing election law, the most common types deal with absentee ballots, mail-in ballots. People will apply for a ballot on behalf of someone else, have it mailed to their address and try to vote it. Even that is not all that common, but it does happen. The kind of vote fraud, where people vote twice, happens rarely if at all.”

In response to Danforth’s suggestion that the large number of bad applications was “gumming up the system,” David Lagstein, spokesman for the Detroit ACORN office, did not disagree.

The record numbers of new voters registering is indeed a burden on local election officials, he says.

“Election officials are underfunded and have a heavy work load as it gets to election time,” Lagstein went on. “We understand that, and that’s why we have a process that tries to make their job as easy as possible.”

Hebert is not quite as understanding about Danforth’s complaints.

“Election officials have a job to do, and you often see these voter registration drives surge this close to an election,” he says. “The responsibility of the officials is to do their jobs and not complain about it. This is democracy. People are trying to exercise the most fundamental right they have as an American.”

Hebert notes that the same allegations are made by both sides in every election, with the Democrats accusing the Republicans of trying to suppress legal voters and the Republicans accusing the Democrats of encouraging voter fraud.

“There have been several cases where the courts have issued injunctions blocking the Republican National Committee and various state Republican committees from engaging in voter suppression schemes,” he says. “While there are cases out there of voter fraud, they are few and far between and usually involve absentee ballots and not voter impersonation or double voting.”

“The Democratic side carry the day in terms of evidence,” he says.