Michigan ACORN canvasser charged with voter registration fraud

With just a few weeks left until Election Day, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, continues to make headlines. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox announced on Tuesday that charges were being filed against Antonio Johnson, who worked for ACORN as a canvasser to register new voters earlier this year.

A press releasefrom the attorney general’s office spelled out the charges:

Johnson, a convicted felon who is currently being held in Jackson County on a parole violation, is charged with falsifying six State of Michigan voter registration applications. The registrations were submitted through ACORN to City of Jackson Clerk Lynn Fessel. Johnson filled out, signed and submitted the six applications, using two Jackson residents’ names without their permission or knowledge, between May 20, 2008 and June 2, 2008.

Upon receiving the applications, Fessel suspected a problem and asked the Jackson Police Department to investigate in July of this year. The two victims of the forgery told the Jackson Police Department they did not sign the applications and that some of the data used to complete the forms was incorrect. This information was also sent to the Michigan Secretary of State. Cox requested the information from Sec. of State Terri Lynn Land in September. After reviewing the information, Cox determined that charges were necessary.

“This is an obvious case of forgery and that is why I am taking action today,” said Cox. “This office will not stand by while criminals interfere with the voting rights of Michigan citizens.”

David Lagstein, the chief organizer for ACORN in Michigan, said the group is cooperating fully with the investigation and is now in the process of retrieving its employment records for Johnson:

“We’ve written a letter to the attorney general offering to cooperate in any way we can. If the charges are accurate then ACORN will both cooperate and support appropriate legal action to be taken. If the allegations are true, this individual is guilty of forgery and cheated the organization by not doing his job. We are also in the process of researching the employment records of this individual. In the majority of cases where accusations against the organization or its workers have come out, ACORN has already flagged this staff member or the individual cards as suspect.”

ACORN is required by law to turn all registration applications, even those that appear to be suspect, over to local election officials.

Because the disputed applications were filled out in May and June, Lagstein said, records pertaining to them have now been scanned into an archive, and it may take a couple of days to retrieve them. Lagstein added that he questions the timing of the announcement just weeks before an election, which he thinks is evidence of a coordinated strategy to discredit ACORN in the heat of an election season:

These cards were submitted in May and June, so we have to ask the question of why these charges were not filed until three weeks before election day, on the same day that the McCain campaign called a press conference to criticize ACORN. This is part of a coordinated partisan attack. ACORN supports the filing of the charges, thinks they are appropriate and that they prove that the system works. Our concern is about the timing of the action. If these allegations are true, what Mr. Johnson did is in contrast to the hard work of hundreds of people who help to make this what we believe will be an historic turnout in Michigan and around the country.

Gerry Hebert, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, which was founded by McCain campaign attorney Trevor Potter, told the Michigan Messenger that the timing suggests that the attorney general is trying to use the prosecution for political effect:

In 2006, a couple of ACORN canvassers in Kansas City, Missouri were indicted by the feds just prior to the 2006 November elections by U.S. Attorney [Bradley] Schlozman. Virtually the same day, the Missouri GOP held a press conference to announce the indictment. Schlozman later conceded to the Senate Judiciary Committee the indictments themselves could have waited until after the election without affecting the ability to prosecute the individuals. It was clear that his timing was done solely for the purpose of raising the issue of voter fraud just prior to the election to help the GOP. The timing of the attorney general’s indictment and the circumstances under which this case has arisen is awfully similar to what happened in Kansas City in 2006.

Hebert, who spent two decades in the voting rights department at the Department of Justice under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said the DOJ has traditionally avoided taking actions like this during an election season:

The DOJ has a policy of A) not taking action against individuals and B) not timing their prosecutions just prior to the election in order to avoid having any impact on the results of the election. They don’t want to be seen as trying to influence the election.

Calls to the Michigan attorney general’s office for comment were not returned.

Republicans have been trying relentlessly to draw attention to ACORN in the final weeks of this campaign. During Wednesday’s final debate, GOP nominee John McCain said the group was “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” Experts have said that this kind of rhetoric overlooks the fact that turning in fraudulent voter registration cards does not have any effect on actual voting.

Lori Minnite, a political scientist and voting rights expert from Columbia University, noted that these claims generally rely on anecdotal evidence, stories of some canvasser turning in an application in the name of “Mickey Mouse” or someone who already died.

But even if somehow those applications were not caught and rejected by election officials, neither Mickey Mouse nor a dead person is going to turn up at a polling place to cast a vote. Minnite said: “These are the people that seize on faulty registrations as proof that massive voter fraud is going on. This is an obviously faulty assumption. Do fake registrations equal fake ballots? No.”