STEALING The Election

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Registered: 10-01-2004
STEALING The Election
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Thu, 10-09-2008 - 8:39am

CLEVELAND - Two Ohio voters, including Domino's pizza worker Christopher Barkley , claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they'd already signed up.


Barkley estimated he'd registered to vote "10 to 15" times after canvassers for ACORN, whose political wing has endorsed Barack Obama, relentlessly pursued him and others.


Claims such as his have sparked election officials to probe ACORN.


"I kept getting approached by folks who asked me to register," Barkley said. "They'd ask me if I was registered. I'd say yes, and they'd ask me to do it again.



"Some of them were getting paid to collect names. That was their sob story, and I bought it," he said.


Barkley is one of at least three people who have been subpoenaed by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections as part of a wider inquiry into possible voter fraud by ACORN. The group seeks to register low-income voters, who skew overwhelmingly Democratic.


"You can tell them you're registered as many times as you want - they do not care," said Lateala Goins, 21, who was subpoenaed.


"They will follow you to the buses, they will follow you home, it does not matter," she told The Post.


She added that she never put down an address on any of the registration forms, just her name.


A third subpoenaed voter, Freddie Johnson, 19, filled out registration cards 72 times over 18 months, officials said.


"It feeds the public perception that there could be , and that makes the pillars fall down," said local Board of Elections President Jeff Hastings.


Registering under a fake name is illegal. But officials usually catch multiple registrations and toss them.


The major risk of fraud growing out of mass canvassing involves the possibility of ineligible voters filing absentee ballots, and thus avoiding checks at polling places, said Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross.


The subpoenas come as Republicans have ramped up criticism of ACORN. Officials in Nevada raided ACORN's Las Vegas office Tuesday, accusing the group of signing people up multiple times - in some cases under phony names, like those of Dallas Cowboys.


ACORN's Cleveland spokesman, Kris Harsh, said his group collected 100,000 voter-registration cards; only about 50 were questionable, he claimed.


As for workers, "We watch them like a hawk," he said.


jeane.macintosh@nypost.com


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2001
Fri, 10-10-2008 - 7:18pm
Honesty and character are factors to be considered when evaluating an opinion.
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-10-2008
Fri, 10-10-2008 - 7:20pm
Fraud probably accounts for Obama's slight lead.
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-01-2004
Tue, 10-14-2008 - 10:31am
Sounds like Canada's election is getting "interesting".
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-01-2004
Tue, 10-14-2008 - 10:39am

An article of interest to the well-informed, the well-educated, and those concerned with a fair election:


BOGUS VOTER BOOTED AMID PROBE OF ACORN
4,000 OF LEFT-WING GROUP'S SIGN-UPS ARE SHADY


By JEANE MacINTOSH in Cleveland and MAGGIE HABERMAN in New York







Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge



Last updated: 10:11 am
October 14, 2008
Posted: 3:44 am
October 14, 2008


Investigators probing ACORN have learned that an Ohio man registered to vote several times and cast a bogus ballot with a fake address, officials said yesterday, as they revealed that nearly 4,000 registration applications supplied by the left-leaning activist group were suspect.


The vote of Darnell Nash, one of four people subpoenaed in a Cuyahoga County probe of ACORN's voter-registration activities, was canceled and his case was turned over to local prosecutors and law enforcement, Board of Elections officials said yesterday.


Nash had registered to vote repeatedly from an address that belonged to a legitimately registered voter, officials said during a hearing at which the subpoenaed voters were to testify.


Board officials had contacted Nash this summer, questioned his address and told him to stop repeat registering.


But still, he breezed into Ohio election offices - the state allows early voting for president - reregistered with a fake address and cast a paper ballot, officials said.


"He came in on 9/30 and Mr. Nash again registered to vote at address, and he cast a ballot," said board official Jane Platten.


Nash did not turn up for the hearing.


The Post reported last week on the Cleveland-area probe and the subpoenas, which were sent out to four people - including two voters who said they were hounded by ACORN workers to register over and over, even when they warned they'd already done so.


It's the latest issue in the probe of ACORN's registering voters in Ohio, one of at least nine states where officials are investigating similar reports of phony sign-ups by the group.


At the same time, officials said, some 5 percent, or 3,650, of the 73,000 total registration cards turned in by ACORN in the Cleveland area from its Project Vote initiative to sign up low-income voters were "questionable," Platten said.


There were "egregious acts of registering multiple times," said Platten. "The extent of it is beyond the resources of this board."


Nash's case and three others were turned over to authorities yesterday, said Ryan Miday, a spokesman for prosecutor Bill Masson.


"We will consider presenting it to a grand jury," Miday said.


A member of the board said if necessary, the FBI or federal prosecutors could be brought in for assistance.


Still, members of the bipartisan board downplayed any voter fraud.


And Platten insisted officials with ACORN have offered "any and all" help in probing the questionable activities. Katy Gall, the Ohio state director for ACORN, said her group is cooperating fully with the investigation.


She added that her group has fired anyone who was found soliciting duplicate registrations.


ACORN, whose political arm has endorsed Democratic nominee Barack Obama, has signed up more than 1.3 million voters for this cycle.


ACORN adviser Scott Levenson said, "If one of the 13,000 we hired is potentially a bad apple in the bunch, we encourage the authorities to prosecute, as appropriate, anyone that did the wrong thing. We discipline we fire workers who . . . We encourage prosecutors to follow suit."


He also denied suggestions that the group pays canvassers by the number of names they sign up, and that they have quotas.


Also yesterday:


* Two of the four subpoenaed voters, Freddie Johnson and Christopher Barkley, met privately with sheriff's deputies and described what they'd told The Post about being hounded by ACORN workers. Barkley testified at the hearing that some of the registration cards listing his name weren't filled out by him.


* In an e-mail to supporters, John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, slammed "the left-wing activist group ACORN" and suggested, "We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election."


jeane.macintosh@nypost.com


iVillage Member
Registered: 10-01-2004
Tue, 10-14-2008 - 11:02am

ACORN fraud continues:


tampabay.com



Vote drives defended, despite fake names


By Richard Danielson, Times Staff Writer

Published Monday, October 13, 2008 10:39 PM




Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer.


Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which was stamped with the logo of the nonprofit group ACORN.


Tow truck driver Newton Bell did register to vote in Orange County this summer. In the hands of ACORN, his paperwork went through without a hitch.


Two cases, two outcomes, each with a connection to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.


Nationwide, ACORN is a favorite GOP target for allegations of voter registration fraud this year.


That's not new. Similar complaints followed the 2004 elections. A criminal investigation in Florida found no evidence of fraud. ACORN even has a cameo role in the scandal over the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Department.


Under attack again, ACORN leaders defend their work. Often, they say, things are as not simple as they're portrayed.


Take Mickey Mouse.


Yes, that's their logo. But they say their workers routinely scanned all suspicious applications.


"We don't think this card came through our system," said Brian Kettenring, ACORN's head organizer in Florida.


With more than 450,000 member families nationwide — 14,000 in Florida — ACORN is a grass roots advocacy group focused on health care, wages, affordable housing and foreclosure.


Bell, the truck driver, certainly, is more representative of ACORN's work in Florida than the cartoon mouse is.


This year, ACORN signed up 1.3-million voters nationwide and about 152,000 in Florida, mostly in Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ACORN estimates it flagged 2 percent of its Florida registrations as problematic because they were incomplete, duplicates or just plain bogus.


That's enough to give headaches to election officials and to provide ammunition to Republican activists.


Brevard County elections officials have turned over 23 suspect registrations from ACORN to prosecutors. The state Division of Elections has received two ACORN-related complaints, in Orange and Broward counties.


ACORN wasn't active in the Tampa Bay area. Last week, however, Pinellas County elections officials gave local prosecutors 35 questionable registrations from another group, Work for Progress.


The GOP accuses ACORN of registration fraud all over the country. In Las Vegas, authorities said the group's petitions included the names of the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.


"This is part of a widespread and systemic effort … to undermine the election process," says Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross, who describes ACORN as a "quasicriminal organization."


No, Kettenring said, it's more like Wal-Mart.


"Some percentage of Wal-Mart workers try to get paid without doing their work or steal from their employer," he said.


Some ACORN workers, he said, have simply made up names.


Maybe, elections officials say, but it's still annoying.


"We did experience a significant amount of problems, enough that we did contact the group to express some of our frustration with their work," said Linda Tanko, Orange County's senior deputy supervisor for voter services.


ACORN's problems included applications with unreadable handwriting, missing information, signatures that didn't match those on file, altered dates of birth or Social Security numbers, applications for people already registered to vote and names that appeared repeatedly, often with different addresses.


ACORN said it terminates canvassers who forge applications. In Broward County, it fired one worker after he turned in applications with similar handwriting and brought the matter to the attention of the Supervisor of Elections Office.


Pay to gather registrations started at $8 an hour, and the goal was 20 signups per day. The organization did not pay by the signature or pay bonuses for volume. The organization also tried to follow up on each registration, calling the person listed to confirm that the form is accurate.


In most states, ACORN must turn in every form that is filled out. "We must turn in every voter registration card by Florida law, even Mickey Mouse," Kettenring said.


Well, not yet, said Jennifer Krell Davis, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State.


Florida does have a law saying third-party voter registration groups must turn in every form without regard to things like party affiliation, race, ethnicity or gender. So far, however, the state has not written the rules to implement it.


In Florida, ACORN is best known for its 2004 effort to lead a petition drive to raise the minimum wage. The FDLE looked into voter fraud allegations then and found no laws were broken.


ACORN also played a role in the firing of one of nine U.S. attorneys dismissed in 2006.


In New Mexico, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired "because of complaints by elected officials who had a political interest in the outcome" of, among other things, a Republican voter fraud complaint against ACORN, according to an internal Justice Department report last month.


This year, 39 members of the House of Representatives have asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate ACORN.


One of those, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, also has written to supervisor of elections offices in Central Florida seeking "all ACORN-related registration of voters within the last two years."


Republicans also accuse Sen. Barack Obama of trying to distance himself from ACORN, which he represented in a federal lawsuit in 1995.


ACORN's political action committee has endorsed Obama, but the group says its voter registration efforts are nonpartisan.


And the McCain campaign's complaints now are puzzling, ACORN says, because two years ago McCain was the keynote speaker at an immigration reform rally ACORN co-sponsored in Miami. "In 2006," Kettenring said, "we were working together."


Richard Danielson can be reached at danielson@sptimes.com or (813)269-5311.




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