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May. 04, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
ACORN voter registration drive nets charges
By ALAN CHOATE
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNALA voter registration drive last year illegally required canvassers to meet quotas to keep their jobs and resulted in thousands of “garbage” registrations gumming up Clark County voter rolls, officials said Monday as they released a criminal complaint against the drive’s organizers.
The complaint names the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, as well as Chris Edwards, the group’s former Las Vegas field director, and Amy Busefink, who was regional director for voter registration...
...Lisa Rasmussen, a local attorney representing ACORN, called the allegations against the group “patently false.”
“Even the state concedes in its charging documents that there was no 'quota’ system that was enforced by ACORN,” she said in an e-mailed statement. “Furthermore, the suggestion that a business cannot implement standards of quality control, performance goals and individual job performance tools is contrary to the First Amendment.”
She also said Busefink would not be available for comment.
The charges are Class E felonies, the penalty for which can be probation or one to four years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
At Monday’s announcement, state and local officials strenuously emphasized that the false voter registrations didn’t translate to people being able to vote fraudulently.
“This is a case of voter registration fraud,” said Secretary of State Ross Miller. “There is absolutely no evidence that there was any voter fraud in the last election.”
Larry Lomax, the Clark County registrar of voters, said his office reviewed the 91,002 voter registration forms turned in by ACORN, verifying that information on the form matched information attached to the voter’s driver’s license number or Social Security number.
If it didn’t, those registrations were tagged as requiring identification at the polling place.
There were 28,097 forms that were duplicates or changes of name, party or address, leaving 62,905 new voters.
Of those, 23,186 actually voted in the 2008 general election, according to a report prepared by Lomax’s office.
That means almost 40,000 of the new voters registered by ACORN didn’t vote, and of those, almost 19,000 had information on file that didn’t match what was turned in on the forms.
“That’s 48 percent of those forms that I believe are clearly fraudulent,” Lomax said.
“This is individuals ripping off their bosses because they have a quota to make.”
http://www.lvrj.com/news/breaking_news/44307912.html
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