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Saturday, October 18, 2008
Ind. Law - "ACORN followed law on suspect voter registrations" [Updated]
A good story today by Tim Evans of the Indianapolis Star cuts through some of the election law confusion currently rampant. Some quotes from the lengthy story:
ACORN, the liberal-leaning community activist group, followed the law when it notified authorities that some of the voter registration applications it submitted in Lake County apparently were fraudulent.[Updated 10/19/08] John Byrne of the Gary Post-Tribune has a long story today that begins:What's not clear is whether canvassers acted alone when they created those fraudulent registrations -- a felony officials say they will prosecute -- or whether ACORN might have played some role in their creation.
The group, which has come under fire by Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign for purportedly padding election rolls, acknowledged that some of the canvassers it hired submitted the fraudulent applications.
But ACORN said it had nothing to do with producing the registrations and pointed out it is barred by law from destroying any applications. It also said it is required to turn them in even if it thinks the registrations are fraudulent.
Election officials confirmed ACORN's responsibility under the law. * * *
Nathaniel Persily, a Columbia Law School professor, said registration fraud is very different from actual voter fraud, which occurs at the polls.
"The effect is not going to change the outcome of the election or allow imaginary people to vote," he said.
ACORN said it took steps to ensure officials knew some of the registrations it turned in were potentially bad.
"We ID'd those applications as questionable," Charles D. Jackson, spokesman for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, said of the Lake County applications.
"We turned them in three separate stacks: ones we had been able to verify, ones that were incomplete and ones that were questionable or suspicious."
Jim Gavin, spokesman for Secretary of State Todd Rokita, Indiana's top election official, confirmed that groups that conduct registration drives in the state must turn in all applications they collect.
Failure to do so, Gavin said, is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to one year in prison.
Ruthann Hoagland, assistant registration administrator with the Lake County Board of Elections and Voter Registration, confirmed that about 2,500 applications ACORN submitted were divided into three groups, as Jackson described. * * *
In Indiana, local election officials must verify every application through a variety of sources -- including the BMV, state Department of Health, a federal Social Security database, and the Department of Correction -- before they are added to the voter rolls.
The state's voter ID law, one of the strictest in the U.S., also helps prevent voter fraud, experts said.
The controversy, Persily said, "is distracting from what may be the real problem -- under-qualified, overwhelmed precinct workers and the use of new voting technology and voter registration databases."
"These issues with ACORN may prove to be tiny in comparison with the problems we see on Election Day," Persily said.
CROWN POINT -- Ethel Graves just wants to vote.But like thousands of other would-be voters in Lake County, Graves has gotten swept up in a nationwide controversy over alleged voter fraud by the community organization ACORN.
After moving to Gary from Chicago in July, Graves was approached outside the city's Bureau of Motor Vehicles office by an ACORN canvasser who asked if she wanted to register to vote in the November general election.
"I said, 'Oh, good, you're saving me a trip (to the voter office in Crown Point),' " Graves recalled.
But nearly three months -- and a trip to Crown Point -- later, Graves still was waiting to receive her voter registration card last week.
That's because election officials stopped processing the applications submitted by ACORN amid accusations that information was falsified on hundreds of the forms.
Election workers now are culling through about 5,000 ACORN applications, trying to figure out which are fraudulent, assistant registration administrator Ruthann Hoagland said.
Based on early estimates, Hoagland said about half have some kind of omission or obvious error. The forms with no obvious problems will get processed.
Another 20,000 registration applications not submitted by ACORN also must be checked and entered in Lake County, with the hotly contested election two weeks away and early voting already taking place at four locations.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 18, 2008 01:50 PM
Posted to Indiana Law