| | Voter registration group offices raided in fraud probe
ACORN spokesman calls raid 'a stunt'Nevada authorities have raided Las Vegas office of an organization that aims to register low-income and minority voters as part of a voter fraud investigation.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, is being probed for evidence of voter fraud, and the Nevada Secretary of State tells the Associated Press the organization is accused of submitting multiple registration applications with made-up or duplicated names.
An ACORN spokesman tells RAW STORY the group has been cooperating with the probe into suspect registration forms for the last 10 months.
"We look at this as a stunt, basically," spokesman Charles Jackson said in a brief phone interview.
The group elaborated in an e-mailed statement from Bertha Lewis, its interim chief organizer.“Over the past year, ACORN has worked hard to help over 80,000 people in Clark County register to vote. As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have review all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations.
For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application into election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual.
Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 “problem application packages,” which involved 33 former canvassers.
On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19^th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.
Today's raid by the Secretary of State’s Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls.” According to AP, state and federal authorities formed a election-fraud task force two months ago to probe allegations in Nevada.
Nevada, which has five electoral votes, is one of the most fiercely contested swing states in the 2008 presidential election, with most observers concluding that Democrat Barack Obama has a decent shot of picking up the state that was carried by President Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Voting rights activists have previously worried that the government could use allegations of fraud to intimidate legitimate voters from casting ballots on Election Day, and ACORN's activity has come under Justice Department scrutiny in the past.
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