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1,000's & 1,000's Of Phony Applications

Mike

Well-known member
ACORN Submitted ‘Thousands and Thousands of Phony’ Voter Registrations, County Registrar Says
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By Josiah Ryan, Staff Writer




The Association for Community Reform Now (ACORN) submitted nearly 90,000 voter registration applications to the registrar’s office in Clark County, Nev., this year, among which were “thousands and thousands and thousands of phony and duplicate applications” that ACORN did not mark as suspicious, Larry Lomax, Clark Country registrar of voters, told CNSNews.com.

Matthew Henderson, ACORN’s regional director for Southwest Nevada, however, said that a few duplicate and falsified forms may have slipped through ACORN’s vetting. But the group turned in between 3,000 and 4,000 tagged registration forms, Henderson said, and there is little evidence to support Lomax’s allegations that they missed “thousands.”

On Oct. 7, an ACORN office in Las Vegas, Nev., was raided by local police after Colin Haynes, a criminal investigator for the Nevada Secretary of State Securities Division, submitted an affidavit to a judge requesting a search warrant.

He alleged in the affidavit “that employees of ACORN, while employed to solicit members of the public to complete Voter Registration Applications, have themselves completed forms using fictitious and false information.”

As the affidavit reads: “The investigation started on July 2, 2008 when Larry Lomax, Clark County Registrar of Voters, reported to the division that his office had received a significant number of suspicious Voter Registration Application Forms from ACORN.”

Henderson said that in 2008, ACORN caught nearly 50 of its 700 canvassers engaging in voter-fraud activities and had immediately fired them and tagged the registration applications they had collected before turning them into the registrar’s office.

To track voter registration cards, Nevada State Law requires that organizations participating in voting registration drives submit every completed application to county officials to be vetted, even if the information inside is false.

“Each field registrar shall forward to the county clerk all completed applications in his possession,” the law reads, as posted on the state government Web site.

In complying with the law, however, ACORN officials said they opt to tag voting cards that appear to be suspicious with a special “problematic card-cover sheet” to help registrar officials identify duplicate and phony applications.

“Our responsibility and our interpretation of the law in most states is that it is not our responsibility to deal with that [vetting],” Alleine Delare, a member of the ACORN national board, told CNSNews.com at an Oct. 15 press conference. “We notify them [the election boards], but it’s not our duty to determine what’s valid and what’s not. We must, by law, turn them all in.”

“To repeat what we have said over and over and over again, the cards that are being investigated, the overwhelming majority of the time, have been flagged, tagged, and turned over to local authorities pursuant of local law,” Brian Kettering, a spokesman for ACORN, told CNSNews.com at the same Oct. 15 press conference.

Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was at the conference to show solidarity with ACORN. When asked if the NAACP, which has also done voter registration drives for years, has ever experienced the sort of problems alleged in the voter forms collected by ACORN, Bond said, no.

“So far, as I can recall, it’s not been a problem in the voter drives we have done for decades and decades and decades,” Bond told CNSNews.com. “I can’t say it [registration errors] never happens, but we have never been attacked for it.”




Republican presidential candidate John McCain shakes hands with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (AP Photo)Lomax said he does not know whether ACORN turned in between 3,000 and 4,000 problematic cover sheets, as Henderson claimed. But from January through July, only a small percentage of the fraudulent applications turned in by ACORN were tagged, Lomax said.

“It is very accurate to say the majority of falsified ballots had not been tagged,” Lomax told CNSNews.com. “They claim they registered 90,000 new voters, but that is certainly not true. They may have turned in 90,000 cards, but in that were thousands and thousands and thousands of phony and duplicate applications. It was a pathetic effort.

“To me it was just a token effort,” said Lomax, “so they could respond just as they have been, and say that they have a big quality control effort in place. There was all sorts of garbage in the other [untagged] stack.”

But Henderson told CNSNews.com that Lomax’s data are flawed.

“Though I couldn’t give you an accurate guess of how many got by, I think that it is very unlikely [that thousands got by], and I think Lomax has nothing to base that upon since for seven months he was not tracking them,” said Henderson.

Lomax, however, said that while his office did not track the precise number of fraudulent cards or the number of problem card-cover sheets, they are confident that the difference between the number of problem card-cover sheets and fraudulent voter-registration applications is in the thousands.

“We didn’t track them because we didn’t expect the attention,” Lomax told CNSNews.com. “It’s only now that people like you are asking these questions.”

Meanwhile, investigations involving ACORN have also been launched in 12 of the other 21 states where the organization says it has gathered a total 1.32 million voter registration applications this year.

Allegations against ACORN include a voter registration application for a “Mickey Mouse” living in Orlando; a man in Ohio who has testified that he was offered cigarettes and cash to apply for 73 voter cards; and 10 applications to vote for a deceased woman in Missouri.

Members of ACORN from around the country, however, defended their group at the Oct. 15 press conference, which was held, they said, to "condemn recent Republican attacks on ACORN's hugely successful voter registration efforts."

“We are going to continue our work and we are not going to be swayed by those who are concerned – not by falling morality – but by falling popularity and falling polls,” said Rev. Gloria Swierenga, president of Maryland ACORN.
 

Yanuck

Well-known member
Somebody got some 'splainin' to do! Didn't the Obama campaign donate $800,000 to them? should of used some of it to pay the IRS :wink:
Acorn Report Raises Issues of Legality

An internal report by a lawyer for the community organizing group Acorn raises questions about whether the web of relationships among its 174 affiliates may have led to violations of federal laws.

The group, formally known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been in the news over accusations that it is involved in voter registration fraud, charges it says are overblown and politically motivated.

Republicans have tried to make an issue of Senator Barack Obama’s ties to the group, which he represented in a lawsuit in 1995. The Obama campaign has denied any connection with Acorn’s voter registration drives.

The June 18 report, written by Elizabeth Kingsley, a Washington lawyer, spells out her concerns about potentially improper use of charitable dollars for political purposes; money transfers among the affiliates; and potential conflicts created by employees working for multiple affiliates, among other things.

It also offers a different account of the embezzlement of almost $1 million by the brother of Acorn’s founder, Wade Rathke, than the one the organization gave in July, when word of the theft became public.

“A full analysis of potential liability will require consultation with a knowledgeable white-collar criminal attorney,” Ms. Kingsley wrote of the embezzlement, which occurred in 2000 but was not disclosed until this summer.

In a telephone interview on Monday, Ms. Kingsley and Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s top executive, said the group had begun addressing the concerns raised in the report.

“Has everything been done yet? No,” Ms. Lewis said. “We’ve been at this for three months, and we have taken everything she said in the report very seriously. It’s a huge undertaking.”

Over the weekend, Ms. Kingsley said, the national board adopted several good-governance policies, like appointing an audit committee for the first time.

Disclosure of her report, which was distributed to Acorn and 10 affiliates, increases pressure on the organization at a particularly troublesome time. Besides the inquiries into its voter registration efforts, Acorn faces demands for back taxes by the Internal Revenue Service and various state tax authorities. At the same time, foundations that have backed Acorn are withholding support.

Ms. Kingsley’s concerns about the way Acorn affiliates work together could fuel the controversy over Acorn’s voter registration efforts, which are largely underwritten by an affiliated charity, Project Vote. Project Vote hires Acorn to do voter registration work on its behalf, and the two groups say they have registered 1.3 million voters this year.

As a federally tax-exempt charity, Project Vote is subject to prohibitions on partisan political activity. But Acorn, which is a nonprofit membership corporation under Louisiana law, though subject to federal taxation, is not bound by the same restrictions.

“Project Vote and Acorn have a written agreement that specifies that all work is nonpartisan,” Michael Slater, Project Vote’s new executive director, wrote in answer to e-mailed questions about the relationship.

But Ms. Kingsley found that the tight relationship between Project Vote and Acorn made it impossible to document that Project Vote’s money had been used in a strictly nonpartisan manner. Until the embezzlement scandal broke last summer, Project Vote’s board was made up entirely of Acorn staff members and Acorn members.

Ms. Kingsley’s report raised concerns not only about a lack of documentation to demonstrate that no charitable money was used for political activities but also about which organization controlled strategic decisions.

She wrote that the same people appeared to be deciding which regions to focus on for increased voter engagement for Acorn and Project Vote. Zach Pollett, for instance, was Project Vote’s executive director and Acorn’s political director, until July, when he relinquished the former title. Mr. Pollett continues to work as a consultant for Project Vote through another Acorn affiliate.

“As a result, we may not be able to prove that 501(c)3 resources are not being directed to specific regions based on impermissible partisan considerations,” Ms. Kingsley said, referring to the section of the tax code concerning rules for charities.

She also found problems with governance of Acorn affiliates. “Board meetings are not held, or if they are, minutes are not kept, or if minutes are kept, they never make it into the files,” she wrote.

Project Vote, for example, had only one independent director since it received a federal tax exemption in 1994, and he was on the board for less than two years, its tax forms show. Since then, the board has consisted of Acorn staff members and two Acorn members who pay monthly dues.

But George Hampton, who was listed as a board member from 1994 to 2006, said that while he had been a member of Acorn, he had never heard of Project Vote. “I don’t know anything about this,” Mr. Hampton said.

Cleo Mata, listed as a board member on tax forms from 1997 to 2006, also said she was not aware she was on the Project Vote board. “If that’s what you say,” Ms. Mata told a visitor to her home in Pasadena, Tex. “I tell you that I didn’t realize I was.”

Mr. Slater said he “cannot speak to why Mr. Hampton and Ms. Mata fail to recall their involvement on the Project Vote board.” He noted that Ms. Mata, 63, was “in poor health.”

Project Vote assembled a new board this fall that Ms. Kingsley said had greater independence, even though five of the six new members have longstanding ties to Acorn.

Ms. Kingsley’s description of the embezzlement differed from the organization’s. In an interview July 8, Ms. Lewis said 90 percent of the $948,607 Mr. Rathke’s brother embezzled came from Acorn and the rest from its charity affiliates.

But Ms. Kingsley reported that $215,000 was charged to an Acorn American Express card paid by the Acorn Beneficial Association, a pension fund that has been replaced by a new Acorn pension fund. After the embezzlement was discovered, the Acorn Beneficial Association wrote off the embezzlement as a gift to Acorn.

Acorn contends that the fund is not covered by federal pension fund regulations, but Ms. Kingsley wrote: “It is nonetheless the case that a number of organizations, possibly including unions and charities, paid funds into the A.B.A. for entirely different purposes. They did not make those contributions in order to make a gift to Acorn.”

Ms. Kingsley also found that the Acorn Fund, a health care benefits fund, had advanced “a large amount of money” to Acorn, adding that it appeared that the money was used to cover “the cash shortfall caused by the embezzlement.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/us/22acorn.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=acorn&st=cse&scp=2
 
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