Posted on 10/17/2004 10:01:59 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
Sneaky voter-drive employees are to blame for submitting hundreds of faulty registration applications in Colorado, said an official with the nonprofit organization that mobilized the effort.
These workers were able to thwart the drive's system of checks and balances, said Jim Fleischmann, regional coordinator of the voting registration effort of the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, commonly known as ACORN.
But he stressed that it was only a small number of employees involved in the deception and a small percentage of the total voters the organization registered.
ACORN was one of several organizations across the country to aggressively register new voters. Employees were paid hourly to register people to vote, and other staff members were diligently checking the veracity of the applications, Fleischmann said.
But that wasn't enough.
Apparently, several employees filled out numerous duplicate applications, but submitted them one-by-one over an extended period of time, he said.
The staff checking the applications therefore didn't see a bunch of applications with the same name all at once, so no red flags were raised, Fleischmann said.
It wasn't until a county clerk contacted ACORN that Fleischmann said he realized what had happened.
It's unclear how many faulty applications were submitted, he said, but it could be several hundred.
Fleischmann said he fired several employees and hired more on-site management and additional staff to verify the applications.
Although Fleischmann acknowledged the seriousness of the problem, he noted that the bad applications represent less than one percent of the 32,000 legitimate applications ACORN submitted in Colorado.
ACORN's mission, Fleischmann said, is to register as many voters as possible. It does the organization no good to register fraudulent voters, because, in the end, those votes don't count. "We abhor voter fraud," Fleischmann said.
Fleischmann's experiences are not unique. Several registration drives have had similar problems.
County clerks have submitted hundreds of questionable voter registration applications to state and local prosecutors. Most are still under investigation, but one man has been charged.
John MaCarthy, of Aurora, is accused of forging 48 voter registration applications.
MaCarthy worked for Lee Petition Management and Campaign Finance Co., a petition gathering company, earning $3 for every Democratic or unaffiliated voter he registered.
Some county clerks have said paying circulators for each application is asking for fraud. But some organization officials said every voter registration drive runs the same risk.
The trick, they said, is checking the applications once the worker submits them.
Ben Prochazka of the Colorado New Voters Project said his workers are paid $40 a day to gather voter registration applications. They registered more than 100,000 voters without problems, he said.
Applications are checked by four people, and staff members randomly pull applications and call the voter to make sure they have just registered. "I think we did a good job of holding our staff accountable," Prochazka said. "Having the roster filled with faulty applications only makes our job harder."
Lawyers are standing by
• A Colorado nonprofit has set up a hot line for voters who believe they've been unfairly turned away from the polls this election. The nonpartisan FairVoteColorado.org has assembled a team of six volunteer attorneys in Denver - and others in at least 12 outlying counties - to assist voters starting Monday, when early voting begins. They're reachable toll-free at 888-839-4301.
cristg@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2231
Paying people to register voters has to stop; if they're too lazy to get registered, they shouldn't vote.
small number?? ACORN is doing this ALL over the country
Prosecute the bastages.
What concrete steps are being taken not only to detect invalid registrations but also fraud once an invalid voter has submitted a ballot? I know this probably differs state by state though am interested to hear what is being done to minimize this problem.
You need to keep asking that question.
Ask: (1) The Republican Party, (2) the prosecuting attorneys' orifices, (3) the law enforcement agencies.
They need to get these questions from many, many, many people EVERY TIME there is a substantiable accusation of fraud. Enough "encouragement" of that sort, and they'll realize that there is some agitation out there about this.
There are various things they can do... whether they're doing them all, or not, is another question. I've been posting repeatedly to these threads asking what exactly Demonrats would have to do to commit actual voting fraud - not just registration fraud, but *actual vote fraud*, because that's what we have to care about. Just registering 184 people at every Demonrat local office won't cut it - they have to *vote* those people, and that requires a coordinated campaign of fraud and deception which *can* be detected by effective law enforcement.
Voter rolls can be scanned automatically for large numbers of people registered at one address. If voter registration cards are required, they will have to be mailed to an address.
Video cameras can be put in place at the polling locations. The Demonrats ought to be only too happy to do that, so that they can catch the (nonexistent) Evil Republicans scaring wimmen-n-minorities away from the polls, right? Problem for them is that it will also capture on camera anyone who tries to vote twice - and, most importantly, they'll *know* they're on camera.
Here in Oregon, where we vote by mail, elections orificials have your signature on file from your voter registration and it pops up on their screen (yes, they're digitizing your signature - Think you're safe from someone raiding a Gummint database and using your signature to commit fraud?) so they can compare it with your signature on the registration you sent in. We will have monitors watching the elections officials for irregular behavior, such as not rejecting any at all or rejecting too many.
I could carry on for page after page, but the bottom line is (1) you can't sit around and wait for someone else to put the Gubmint (and the Republican Party, FTM) on the spot to do its job - you have to start asking those questions of them yourself, (2) you can VOLUNTEER for the Republican election monitoring teams.
Among these many links is information about ACORN, ACT, Project Vote, PIGRIM, and other shadowy "activist" groups who have a long & sordid history behind the scenes.
I suggest you take these people very, very seriously- remember how the Left practices Projection?
When they scream about "disenfranchisement" on TV, it's a dodge around the fact that they, and their proxies like ACORN, are already disenfranchising you...
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