[COMM-ORG] ACORN and voter registration

[Discussion list for COMM-ORG]

From:     Steve Kest, ACORN Executive Director <legrep at acorn.org>




      An Update From ACORN

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Here are two pieces from over the weekend that definitively put to rest
the myth of "voter fraud" resulting from ACORN's voter registration
campaign:  one from ProPublica, published by Politico, and the other by
Mark Crispin Miller in Saturday's Wall Street Journal.

Also, Jim Morin, a cartoonist, illustrated this point perfectly in
Sunday's Miami Herald. The cartoon can be found here
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=GAHEbcYc318Fb1qT75L0mv6QyZ3JML7f>.

Steve Kest

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*GOP offers scant proof of voter fraud*
By: Chisun Lee - ProPublica
November 2, 2008 10:38 AM EST

/Chisun Lee is a reporter for ProPublica
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=SqtMBDVxk9SiXgAXvz2PN%2F6QyZ3JML7f>, 

America's largest independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces
investigative journalism in the public interest.// /

For weeks, Republican leaders have warned that widely reported problems
with fake voter registrations could result in a flood of phony votes in
pivotal states.

But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of
the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=dDTbQ3dLI3GaIAuXMVLEA%2F6QyZ3JML7f>, 

said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which
this had occurred.

"Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a
phony registration form? No, I can't cite one, chapter and verse," he said.

The claims and counterclaims about fraudulent voting have emerged as a
prominent issue in the 2008 campaign. Sen. John McCain declared in the
final presidential debate that ACORN

<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Ry7%2BTQTC9q1apiT46UjQ7f6QyZ3JML7f> 
-
the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the
low-income advocacy group whose temporary staffers submitted thousands
of faked applications - "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one
of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe
destroying the fabric of democracy."

Republican elected officials and lawyers for state Republican parties
have made similar claims in court and in statements to the press. So
far, however, they have failed to provide significant supporting evidence.

A review of prosecutors' statements and documents filed by Republicans
in the most serious new cases alleging voter fraud shows that none offer
an example in which a fraudulently registered person managed to cast a
valid vote. While several cases argue that such frauds are possible,
none sketched a scenario for how massive numbers of people could fake
registrations and then vote.

Asked for specifics about the dangers of fake registration, Ben Porritt,
a spokesman for the McCain campaign, provided links to 13 news clips and
a 2003 Missouri state auditor's report. Eleven of the cases did not
involve registration fraud. Two recounted how felons appeared to have
cast illegal votes under their own names. The lone example of a forged
registration leading to an illegitimate vote comes from The Wall Street
Journal's John Fund, who in April 2006 wrote that a community organizer
had improperly registered a noncitizen, and "someone eventually voted in
[the noncitizen's] name."

Michaelson, who served for 27 years as executive director of the
Illinois Board of Elections, said the sharp exchanges over registration
fraud have undermined voters' confidence in the electoral system.

"The fact that so many of these illegal registrations are being made
public raises a perception in the minds of people,'' he said. "That's
more of a general concern. You don't want to perpetuate the idea that
our election process is lacking integrity."

Asked whether his own party was responsible for fostering that
perception, Michaelson said, "Well, it doesn't help. It has captured the
attention of a lot of people." Why do it, then? "Maybe it's because
there's nothing else to talk about," he said.

Michaelson could not cite a single real example of how registration
fraud has led to voting fraud. He said that an election-rigging scheme
starting with phony application forms would not make much sense.
Michaelson joined the McCain team when asked by its general counsel,
Trevor Potter, whom he knew from their days working together at the
Federal Election Commission.

Michaelson explained why the mere perception of widespread fraud can do
public harm: "When reports are circulating in the media that this one
group has turned in 5,000 applications and 2,000 of them are invalid,
for the minimally informed voter, they say, 'Oh my gosh, what's
happening to our process? Our process is lacking integrity.' It just
plants seeds of doubt in the minds of people who don't understand the
process very well.

"That's just not a very healthy atmosphere," he said.

This week, the Ohio GOP launched an ad
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claiming "hundreds of thousands of new voter registrations are
questionable" and asking, "Could Ohio's election be stolen?"

The implied link between registration and voting fraud has ranged beyond
sound bites. It has driven Republicans' invocation of legal power to
scrutinize voters, demands for U.S. Justice Department intervention and
court orders, and criminal investigations.*
*

*Fake registrations an unlikely vehicle for fraud*

Numerous election experts, including Barnard College political scientist
Lorraine Minnite and Justice Department veteran Gerald Hebert of the
Campaign Legal Center, told ProPublica that fake registrations were an
unlikely and unwieldy means of stealing an election.

Such a scheme would have to involve a substantial crew of
fraudsters-tens of thousands of people-willing to risk the hefty prison
sentences and fines if caught.

Michaelson agreed that the scenario is implausible. "We have to
distinguish between voter registration fraud and voter election fraud,"
he said. He said that officials "inundated at the last minute" with
piles of applications can let phony registrants "slip through the
cracks" and get on the voter rolls. But he could not name a type of
voting fraud that would begin with the filing of false registrations.

The McCain campaign has asserted that phony registrations could
facilitate fraud on absentee ballots. "Voter registration fraud can
quickly turn into vote fraud - especially in the case of absentee
balloting and in states that do not require photo identification to
vote," the campaign wrote in a letter
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to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling for a federal
investigation. (The Associated Press, quoting two "senior law
enforcement officials," recently reported that an inquiry is under way.
Justice Department spokesperson Laura Sweeney told ProPublica she
couldn't "confirm or deny" an investigation.)

Michaelson said absentee ballot scams have typically involved political
operatives telling legitimately enrolled people whom to vote for.

Another member of McCain's Honest and Open Election Committee, Harvard
law professor and former U.S. solicitor general Charles Fried, stepped
down last week after voting absentee
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for Obama-Biden. He said by e-mail that the campaign's positions on
voter fraud had not figured in his decision. "It was all about Sarah
Palin who is spectacularly unqualified," Fried wrote. "My decision had
nothing at all to do with the justified outrage against the shenanigans
of ACORN and the like."

*GOP bid for voter lists could spawn eligibility challenges*

Republicans have gone to court in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to
obtain the names of new registrants. Their target often has been lists
of names flagged when states compared their voter rolls to other data
bases, such as motor vehicle registrations and Social Security. Those
checks, required under a new federal law, have already been shown to be
notoriously error-prone
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=8EKNrOQLbwyi7h02iZUeb%2F6QyZ3JML7f>. 

Critics have said that disclosing the lists to a political party would
enable mass eligibility challenges that could cause confusion at crowded
polling sites.

The GOP sought a list of more than 20,000 new registrants in Wisconsin.
Among those tagged as suspect were four of the six retired judges who
make up the state's bipartisan election board. The Wisconsin Republican
Party's brief warned that, if the presidential election is very close,
"the deciding votes may well be cast by ineligible voters registered
illegally." It alluded to "criminal behavior" involving registrations,
citing factual support consisting of three news accounts: one about a
woman charged
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=wb9Jxh3Sz8fI8lHCgyEJvdkGhyf%2BAW4Q> 

with submitting phony forms, one saying registration workers were being
investigated
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possible fraud, and one quoting a Republican spokesperson saying the
hiring of former felons to collect voter applications - even if not
illegal - "doesn't smell right
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Zes00xrxJcYFb1qT75L0mv6QyZ3JML7f>."

The Wisconsin trial judge rejected the lawsuit on technical grounds, but
noted that she was unpersuaded by the GOP's mentions of "criminal activity."

Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen, a Republican official who
initiated the failed suit, announced Tuesday
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=QTbttY2bBU3I8lHCgyEJvdkGhyf%2BAW4Q> 

that he would deploy more than 50 state law enforcement agents and
collaborate with local prosecutors to guard against fraud on Election
Day. It was unclear what the agents might do, and Van Hollen's office
did not return a call from ProPublica.

Prosecutors are

<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=9Ck%2BFlrDa1%2BaIAuXMVLEA%2F6QyZ3JML7f>probing 

possible voter fraud in Ohio after a judge rebuffed a GOP attempt to
obtain lists of names of registrants who had been flagged by database
checks.

A Republican filing in that court case cited as its sole evidence a New
York Post
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=lIDdwAtgQkFapiT46UjQ7f6QyZ3JML7f> 

article reporting that one man - after being told by election officials
to stop "repeat registering" - had "breezed into Ohio election offices"
and had "reregistered with a fake address and cast a paper ballot." The
GOP filing said "these bogus registrations can lead, and in fact have
led, to fraudulent absentee voting."

Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters, the southwest Ohio regional
chair of the McCain campaign, launched a grand-jury
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=lDTCHVMtCeHI8lHCgyEJvdkGhyf%2BAW4Q> 

investigation involving several hundred new voters identified in the
database checks. He told The Associated Press
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that he'd received "widespread complaints of fraud," but declined to
discuss details. Local election officials said they hadn't heard any
such complaints. Deters could not be reached for comment.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) last week persuaded
President Bush
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=uR0o2Qun%2FEMq%2FrTkCdrf6%2F6QyZ3JML7f> 

to ask the Justice Department to revive the Ohio legal challenge for
greater scrutiny of new registrants. Otherwise, he warned, "thousands,
if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of names whose information has not
been verified ... will remain on voter rolls. ... And there is a
significant risk - if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast
and counted." The New York Times reported that
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informed sources say Justice will not take up the cause.

Todd Rokita, the Republican secretary of state in Indiana, recently sent
federal and state prosecutors a letter demanding a criminal
investigation into voter registrations involving ACORN. Rokita wrote
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2FX4pHlyjs62pM4f2vdWYCv6QyZ3JML7f>, 

"This is not simply registration fraud. This is voter fraud. ...
Fraudulent registrations are the first step in ... rendering an
inaccurate tally on Election Day." In his letter - portions of which
were redacted - he cited a 2003 local election
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marred by absentee ballot fraud. His office did not respond to a phone
message and detailed email asking about the link between phony
registration applications and phony ballots.

Scholars who have authored books documenting election fraud - political
scientists R. Michael Alvarez of the California Institute of Technology,
Thad Hall of the University of Utah and University of Kentucky historian
Tracy Campbell - told ProPublica they could not think of an example of
registration-driven voter fraud.

Voting rights advocates in recent years have worked to debunk
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assumptions that elections get stolen because individuals fake their
eligibility. They have said that election fraud most commonly involves
party operatives bribing legitimate voters or partisan poll workers
manipulating ballots.

The modern antifraud movement, calling for scrutiny at the individual
voter level, was spearheaded by Republicans after the hairline-close
2000 presidential election, as journalist Jeffrey Toobin

<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=GG4zUjRCA0GiXgAXvz2PN%2F6QyZ3JML7f> 

has described at length. A five-year, nationwide voter-fraud
investigation by the Bush Justice Department yielded 86 convictions
<http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=mcwGTMM0F%2FSaIAuXMVLEA%2F6QyZ3JML7f> 

as of 2006 - some for multiple voting or vote buying, and many of people
who claimed not to have realized that their citizenship or criminal
record mattered.

McCain adviser Michaelson believes that the real way to prevent stolen
outcomes - or the perception of them - is to abolish the partisan
oversight systems that prevail in most states. Officials, he said, "are
the final barriers to election fraud. But we have districts where it's
really hard to find a legitimate Republican or a legitimate Democrat.
Even if on paper you have [bipartisan] checks and balances, you really
don't."

"The problem is when you have a razor-thin margin of victory like in
Florida 2000," Michaelson said, "then these individual instances of
fraud that otherwise would be accepted as part of the imperfect election
process - elections are messy - just become very, very important."

"Frankly," Michaelson said, "all election administrators hope for
landslides in their jurisdictions."
/
//Kristin Jones of ProPublica contributed to this story./

/http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/15155.html/
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------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wall Street Journal
NOVEMBER 1, 2008
ESSAY
Will This Election Be Stolen?
/As both parties battle over just how fraud could taint this election,
two analysts with very different viewpoints look at voting abuses from
the beginning of the republic to the present day.
//
By MARK CRISPIN MILL/ER
The GOP's attack on the integrity of voters, carried out by party
leaders -- a sitting president included -- on the eve of an election, is
unprecedented.

The day after John McCain charged the community-based organization Acorn
(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) with planning
"one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country," Sarah
Palin told a boisterous crowd in Bangor, Maine: "In this election, it's
a choice between a candidate who won't disavow a group committing voter
fraud, and a leader who won't tolerate voter fraud."

Soon George Bush leaped into the furor over "voter fraud," asking the
Department of Justice to determine whether some 200,000 newly registered
Ohio voters should have their identities confirmed. (The Supreme Court
had refused that measure; and former Justice Department lawyers claim
that the probe requested by the president may violate department policy.)

Meanwhile, Ohio congressman John Boehner, House minority leader, wrote
Mr. Bush a letter noting "a significant risk, if not a certainty, that
unlawful votes will be cast and counted" in his state, where there are
now several lawsuits over the apparent threat of Democratic "voter fraud."

Election fraud in the U.S. traces back to the beginning of elections.
There's a danger now that eligible voters will be disenfranchised by the
thousands, because of efforts to prevent a few unlawful votes. Although
the GOP's barrage of charges is unique, the apprehension of "unlawful
votes" is hardly new, recalling fears as old as the republic -- or,
indeed, even older.

The worry that the undeserving may cast votes recalls the major argument
that, in the 18th century, was used to justify strict property
requirements for all voters in America. As historian Alexander Keyssar
points out in his magisterial "The Right to Vote," those without
property were deemed incapable of voting soundly, since their dependency
would cause them to defer to those above them. And yet, as Mr. Keyssar
notes, those arguing against enfranchising the poor were just as likely
to believe not that the poor have no will of their own, but that the
poor have too much will. Give such have-nots the vote, believed John
Adams, and "an immediate revolution would ensue."

In the 18th century, such qualms were largely theoretical, as voting was
restricted to white male freeholders (or, a little later, taxpayers) in
a land of villages and farms. In any case, those contradictory
misgivings soon receded, as, at first, the busy young republic was
increasingly committed to an optimistic faith in universal suffrage.

In that homogeneous society, the problem of "unlawful votes" was not a
pressing concern -- as it would be by the middle of the 19th century,
when the nation's rampant industry produced a new crop of cities,
filling up with huddled masses that Americans did not want at the polls.
There were increasing hordes of Irish Catholics, Jews, Italians, Slavs,
Chinese and other foreign workers crowded into slummy neighborhoods, and
they were often muttering of explosive creeds -- variants of socialism
and anarchism -- deeply threatening to the peace and order of the U.S.

Worse, such aliens were getting organized politically, and setting up
their own political machines, like Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall, that had
large ethnic numbers on their side. And then there was the liberated
South, where millions of black freedmen suddenly enjoyed the right to
vote, and so would shortly rule the roost (or so it seemed to many
nervous whites). "We have received an almost unlimited immigration of
adult foreigners, largely illiterate, of the lowest class and of other
races," wrote an anonymous contributor to the Atlantic Monthly in 1879.
"We have added at one stroke four millions and more of ignorant negroes
to our voting population."

Thus many white Americans, native-born, were primed to buy the tales of
massive voter fraud in every ghetto -- party hoodlums stuffing ballot
boxes, people selling votes, etc. -- even though such stories were, as
Mr. Keyssar notes, "greatly exaggerated." Such anecdotes persisted
through the decades, ultimately helping to create a sort of
counter-narrative against the history of the South, where whites had
long suppressed the black vote with appalling ruthlessness.

In tacit contradiction to that story, and especially after the passage
of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the old myth of the demonic trickiness
of urban voters (i.e., Democrats) now began to serve as propaganda for a
GOP intent on courting disaffected whites, according to "the Southern
strategy" (which started under Richard Nixon). Such lore has taught us
all about dead people turning out to vote, secret wads of
"walking-around money" and other tricks allegedly played by the
Democrats alone.

That propaganda has been most effective -- and a lot of it just happens
to be true. For example, "Landslide Lyndon" Johnson stole his first
election to the Senate in 1948, gaining his minuscule victory margin, 87
votes, through ballot fraud (an act that his biographer Robert Caro
called "brazen thievery"). Chicago's infamous Mayor Richard Daley ran
the elections there with both an iron hand and no regard for civic
probity. In 1960 he helped steal Illinois for John F. Kennedy by rigging
the election in Chicago -- where the turnout was an awesome 89%.

Such offenses were, however, not exclusively a Democratic specialty.
That year in Illinois, while Daley was doing dirty work in Chicago for
John Kennedy, the GOP in neighboring DuPage County, the state's top
stronghold of Republicans, went even further in its bid to steal the
race for Richard Nixon, since that county's turnout was a staggering
93%. (This comes from county records researched for my book "Loser Take
All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.")

The GOP was also using phantom votes and fake addresses. In 1968, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking at voter fraud in Gary,
Ind., where Richard Hatcher, a black Democrat, was running for mayor.
Agent Robert Craig spent days trying to verify the information written
out on scores of voter registration cards filed by Republicans. "Names
and addresses of 'voters' turned out to be vacant lots where there had
never been a house, or the house had been torn down years before the
'person' was registered," Mr. Craig told me in a recent telephone
conversation. "The vast majority of the registrations I checked were
completely phony."

While both sides always used such tactics, in this century it is the GOP
that's done most to rig the vote (with little outcry from the
Democrats). In 2000, thousands of Floridians were purged illegally from
the voter rolls before Election Day, according to the sworn testimony of
George Bruder, a vice president of Database Technologies, before the
U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The vote count in Miami-Dade County was
shut down by a disturbance variously referred to as a "Brooks Brothers
riot" or "bourgeois riot," where several people were pushed and shoved
by staffers working for congressional Republicans.

Four years later, in Ohio, ballots were altered or destroyed on a
massive scale, making Mr. Bush's win there questionable, says researcher
Richard Hayes Phillips. (Officially, Bush won the state by some 118,000
votes.) The damage came to light through a three-year audit led by Mr.
Phillips of ballots from selected precincts in 18 Ohio counties (the
research is available in his book, "Witness to a Crime").

Recently, Acorn's alleged "unlawful votes" have caused a major stir.
Although resonantly charged with "voter fraud," the group has actually
been accused of voter-registration fraud -- i.e., the entry of false
information on voter-registration forms. In Acorn's case, the crime was
perpetrated by volunteers who, probably for mercenary reasons, filled
out the forms with bogus names like Mickey Mouse. Acorn itself
discovered the suspicious forms and turned them in to the authorities.

Meanwhile, the very party that is demonizing Acorn has now
disenfranchised countless voters nationwide, through a dizzying range of
tactics. Voters have been stricken from the rolls through purges
nationwide, carried out since 2004 at the behest of the Department of
Justice. (Courtrooms throughout New York State are crammed with people
trying to reclaim their right to vote.) Others have been dropped from
the electronic voter rolls, as USA Today began reporting months ago.

Further thousands have been sidelined through the tactic known as "voter
caging": the targeting of certain voters for disenfranchisement. This
tactic usually entails mailing forms to Democratic voters, in the
expectation that the addressees won't fill them out and send them in
(the envelopes are nondescript) -- and if they don't, their names are
stricken from the voter rolls. And then there are the e-voting machines.
Since early voting started recently, worried voters have reported seeing
their votes flipped from Barack Obama to Mr. McCain in West Virginia and
Texas.

It is not the failure or success of any candidate or party that most
matters but the exercise of voting rights, and, through them, our
self-government. If either team prevails despite the disenfranchisement
of some Americans, that victory will mean all that much less; and if
your favorite wins, and then the U.S. doesn't do anything to fix its
voting system (and otherwise restore this faltering democracy), that
victory of his won't matter much at all, since We the People will have
lost control for good.

N*/ew York University professor Mark Crispin Miller's latest book is
"Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy,
2000-2008."/*

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122550597058490345.html
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-- 
Elyssa Koidin
Legislative Representative
ACORN National
739 8th St., S.E.
Washington, D.C. 20003
Phone- (202) 547-2500
Fax- (202) 546-2483

www.acorn.org