ACORN says its safeguards found many of the cards FBI will investigate

ACORN

The group that ran the largest voter-registration drive in the state this year told reporters today that safeguards already in place helped to identify many of the 1,400 cards the FBI is investigating as “potentially fraudulent.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI has opened a preliminary probe into 1,400 “potentially fraudulent” voter registration forms in Bernalillo County. Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver has turned over the suspicious forms to law enforcement.

Two officials for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) said Thursday it was able to identify many of the the potentially fraudulent forms through a call center it ran in the evenings during a registration drive conducted in Bernalillo and Doña Ana counties. Employees called each person listed on a form to verify the information on the registration cards, said ACORN head organizer Matthew Henderson and quality control manager Bianca Brown.

When ACORN turned in the cards, the county clerk received two batches: one large bundle of verified registration cards, and one smaller stack of cards flagged as having problems, Henderson said.

ACORN is required to turn in the cards even when it’s pretty clear that they are invalid, Henderson said. So even if a form has been filled out by “Daffy Duck,” the organization would turn it in to the clerk.

In New Mexico, voter registration is conducted by “voter registration agents” who become officially certified after being trained by the county clerk.

After they are certified, each agent is issued a set of voter registration cards with serial numbers that can be tracked specifically to them. Each card must be mailed back to the county clerk’s office within 48 hours of being filled out.

Sign on wall at ACORN warns against fraudulent voter registration.

In 2008, ACORN provided about 600 people with jobs registering voters. They ensured that each went through the training to become certified and paid them $8 an hour to register new voters, Henderson said. Of the 600 workers, ultimately about 46 were let go for turning in fraudulent cards, or for simply not working out.

Henderson and Brown showed reporters a stack of the internal investigations that were undertaken during the year that led to terminated employees. The group verified the cards themselves before turning them in even though they aren’t required to so that they could catch and terminate employees early in the process.

When asked what constitutes fraud, Henderson said that ultimately the victim is ACORN because the state, county and ACORN itself have such thorough verification systems in place that it would be difficult for a fraudulent card to slip through.

If there’s fraud, he said, it’s being perpetrated by people who are being paid for not doing their work. Instead, they are “home sitting on their couches filling out cards from the phone book because they don’t want to stand out in 100-degree heat registering people to vote.”

ACORN, which has come in for criticism in the past, has registered nearly 80,000 new voters in New Mexico, particularly in the state’s “Democratic-leaning urban areas,” Henderson said. ACORN and other groups have been very active in Bernalillo and Doña Ana counties, and ACORN has received its share of negative headlines in Doña Ana County.

Henderson characterized ACORN’s voter registration agents overall as a “heroic army” that braved 100-degree heat during the summer to register a record-setting number of new voters. It’s a shame, he said, that a few dozen people ripped them off and tainted the effort. But, statistically it was a small percentage of the total.

Henderson said that if a person is outgoing and willing to spend four to five hours on their feet at a time registering people to vote that he or she should be able to turn in 20 cards a day. And, he said, that is what they found with most of their employees. If an employee was finding it difficult to reach the goal of 20 cards per day, ACORN would give them extra training.