About 200K Ohio voters have records discrepancies & Acorn may be victim of its own workers in registration cases

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

About 200K Ohio voters have records discrepancies

By TERRY KINNEY, Associated Press Writer
20 minutes ago
CINCINNATI - Close to one in every three newly registered Ohio voters will end up on court-ordered lists being sent to county election boards because they have some discrepancy in their records, an elections spokesman said Wednesday.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner estimated that an initial review found that about 200,000 newly registered voters reported information that did not match motor-vehicle or Social Security records, Brunner spokesman Kevin Kidder said. Some discrepancies could be as simple as a misspelling, while others could be more significant.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the Ohio Republican Party on Tuesday and ordered Brunner to set up a system that provides those names to county elections boards. The GOP contends the information will help prevent fraud.

"Things already are in motion to comply," Kidder said. "We're working to establish these processes on how we can make this work. The computer work actually began last week."

About 666,000 Ohioans have registered to vote since January.

Brunner previously cross-checked new-voter registrations with databases run by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicle and the Social Security Administration and made the results available online, but the 6th Circuit said the information was not accessible in a way that would help county election boards ferret out mismatches.

Brunner, a Democrat, told The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer on Wednesday that she is concerned the court decision is a veiled attempt at disenfranchising voters. Brunner said she'll urge counties not to force these people to use provisional ballots.

The court gave Brunner until Friday to get election boards the information but it was unclear whether that deadline would be met. The court set no penalty for missing the deadline.

County election officials were trying to determine Wednesday how they will respond once they get the information.

"I'm very concerned with these new requirements as we get closer to Election Day," said Steve Harsman, director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections in Dayton. He said his staff already is working 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

"It's clearly going to have an impact in regard to resources we have to expend to resolve discrepancies," said Jeff Hastings, chairman of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland.

"We've had about 100,000 (registrations) since January and of those about 34,000 since the primary. We will do whatever is required of us."

Also Wednesday, the Ohio Republican Party said it has filed public records requests with all 88 counties for copies of forms submitted by newly registered voters, especially those who registered and cast an absentee ballot on the same day during a one-week window earlier this month.

Brunner has said that 13,141 Ohioans registered and voted immediately during the window.

"We've seen reports of fraudulent registrations, and we want to see those forms first-hand," said Jason Mauk, the state GOP's executive director.

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Associated Press writers Jim Hannah in Dayton and M.R. Kropko in Cleveland contributed to this report.


Acorn may be victim of its own workers in registration cases

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Republicans and their allies in the media and on the Internet are ramping up allegations that the liberal-leaning nonprofit voter registration group Acorn is trying to steal next month's presidential election for Democrat Barack Obama.

Conservative media outlets and Web sites are focusing on Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. According to TVeyes.com, Fox News alone has mentioned Acorn stories 342 times in recent days.

In nearly a dozen states, county registrars have found phony voter registration applications submitted by canvassers for Acorn; criminal investigations are under way in Nevada, Ohio and elsewhere; and a racketeering suit was filed in Ohio this week. The mounting evidence of Acorn's sloppy management and poor supervision, however, so far doesn't support the explosive charges that the group is trying to rig the presidential election.

Larry Lomax, the registrar in Clark County, Nev., said he'd estimate that 25,000 of the 90,000 applications submitted by Acorn this year were duplicates or phony.

However, Lomax said in a phone interview with McClatchy: "I don't think Acorn consciously sets out to turn in fraudulent forms. I just think the people they hire find it incredibly easy to rip off their bosses and turn in fake forms."

While he criticized Acorn's quality control, Lomax said he doubted that any of the fake filings would result in fraudulent votes.

Election officials say that registrations under names such as Mickey Mouse or Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo suggest that Acorn workers were trying to fill their quota of 20 applications to get paid, not to steal the presidency. They say that county registrars or poll workers would flag such obvious pranks, and that anyone who signed a poll book in another person's name would risk being prosecuted for a felony.

Acorn, which boasts that it's registered 1.3 million mostly poor African-Americans this year, said that it's alerted authorities to many of the suspicious applications. Acorn officials said the group has fired numerous workers who filled in forms with names from the phone book or the Dallas Cowboys starting lineup rather than trekking from door to door.

Moreover, said Acorn spokesman Scott Levenson, state laws in most of the 21 states where the group is active require it to turn all new registrations it collects over to election officials. The group follows that policy even in states where it's not required, but Acorn notifies election officials of suspect registrations in all states. “It is our policy to turn in them all,” Levenson said.

Nevertheless, Republicans have seized on the reports to attack Obama, who led a voter registration drive on Chicago's South Side in 1992 for Project Vote, a group that later hired Acorn to register voters. They also pointed to the Obama campaign's hiring of an Acorn affiliate for get-out-the-vote efforts and to his role, while on the board of two Chicago charities, in approving hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants for Acorn.

In the final presidential debate on Wednesday night, John McCain said that Obama has been affiliated with Acorn, which he said is "now on the verge of perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, and maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." McCain said it was "the same outfit that your campaign gave $832,000."

Obama's campaign did pay $832,000 to an affiliate of Acorn, Citizens Services, to help turn out voters in Democratic primaries, although the purpose of the money was initially misstated in reports to the Federal Election Commission. Obama acknowledged during the debate that he did legal work for Acorn in Chicago in the early 1990s on a suit to force the city to comply with the National Voter Registration Act.

On Tuesday, the conservative-leaning Buckeye Institute filed a racketeering suit against Acorn in Warren County, Ohio, a Republican stronghold in the southwestern part of the state. The suit, nearly identical to a 2004 suit that was withdrawn after the election, seeks to avoid the dilution of legitimate votes, but doesn't contend "that the election is going to be stolen," said attorney Maurice Thompson, who filed it.

Ohio Acorn spokeswoman Kati Gall called the suit "a political stunt."

Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio followed the suit Wednesday with a letter asking U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to work with Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner "to investigate swiftly any allegations of fraud in Ohio's voter registration process." Separately, a Republican National Committee lawyer argued that convicted felons who work for Acorn shouldn't be allowed to register voters in Milwaukee.

Acorn has long been a target of Republicans, including the Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Five days before the 2006 election, interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman of Kansas City trumpeted the indictments of four Acorn voter registration workers, despite a department policy discouraging politically sensitive prosecutions close to elections. Schlozman is now facing a criminal investigation into the veracity of his congressional testimony about that and other matters.

Wade Henderson, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said he thinks that the Republican attacks on Acorn "are part of a concerted effort to ... discredit the registration of many new voters who may well determine the outcome of the presidential election."