The presidential contenders themselves have sparred over ACORN's role in the election. Republican John McCain, debating Democrat Barack Obama for the final time last week, said democracy itself was potentially in peril as a result of the group's activity.
Experts, however, say such statements are exaggerated. Although they don't question that there's been fraud in voter registration efforts in Nevada and other states, they say it is extremely unlikely to lead to a tainted election here or elsewhere.
In Wednesday's debate, McCain said, "We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
Obama responded, "ACORN is a community organization. Apparently what they've done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names. It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved."
In the current election, ACORN's political arm has endorsed Obama, and his campaign paid hundreds of thousands of dollars during the primaries to a subsidiary of the group, which organizes people in low-income communities, for canvassing. In what the Obama campaign says was a clerical error, the expenditure was listed wrongly on financial disclosures, leading opponents to claim there was a cover-up attempt.
Obama also worked in the 1990s with a voter registration group that now works with ACORN, though it didn't at the time, and was a lawyer for ACORN alongside the U.S. Department of Justice in a voting-rights case.
In a blizzard of news releases, conference calls and e-mails to supporters, the Republicans have made the case that this means Obama is in cahoots with a group that is seeking to corrupt the election.
One e-mail to party members from the Republican National Committee chairman, Robert "Mike" Duncan, said of Democrats, "They will soon be trying to pad their totals at ballot boxes across the country with votes from voters that do not exist. From Ohio and Florida to Wisconsin and Nevada, there are reports of fraudulent voter registration forms being submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a liberal group that is dedicating its resources to electing the Obama-Biden Democrats."
But nonpartisan experts say the "votes from voters that do not exist" claim is bogus.
Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the fraud that's alleged by ACORN workers should be pursued and prosecuted, but "it is not going to lead to any change in election results. That's simply because people don't register fraudulently to cast fraudulent ballots, they do it to get paid for collecting voter registrations."
Nevada election officials say ACORN workers, paid low wages to collect registrations and subject to dismissal if they fell short of daily quotas, had an incentive to put false names, such as those of Dallas Cowboys football players, on the forms or copy the same registration multiple times.
ACORN maintains it is the victim of the fraud and has tried to get bad employees prosecuted. By law, it is required to turn in all the forms, even bad ones, and officials say ACORN did flag some suspect ones.
But officials say most fake or duplicate registrations do not make it onto voter registration lists because they are flagged in databases if they list bad addresses, don't have correct driver's license or Social Security numbers, or are repeats. If some bogus registrations do make it on the list, they won't lead to phony ballots being cast because they don't belong to real people who can actually show up to vote.
"The role the ACORN controversy is playing in the national election is an attempt to use ACORN's problems as a means of guilt by association with Senator Obama," Hasen said. "If ACORN's in some legal trouble, Senator Obama's connections to ACORN must mean there's something wrong that he's involved in."
In addition, he said, the claims of fraud are aimed at providing a basis to challenge voters at the polls, or even to challenge the results of a close election.
For Democratic partisans, it's the Republicans who are potentially tainting the election by trying to suppress the vote. ACORN President Maude Hurd noted that McCain in 2006 publicly allied himself with ACORN; a clip of him with the group has been making the rounds on YouTube.
"What is really going on here is that Senator McCain and his allies are part of a coordinated effort to engage in what appears to be an unprecedented effort to suppress voter turnout," Hurd said. "Repeating a lie doesn't make it true, and the McCain campaign has resorted to the worst type of deceptions in regards to ACORN."
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe charged that the GOP, losing ground in the polls, is engaged in a "highly cynical effort."
"It's highly transparent what they're doing here," he said. "They're going to raise questions, cry out and make arguments about fraud, to try and create a smokescreen to confuse voters and maybe obscure some of their activities."
With the news Thursday that the FBI is conducting a national investigation into ACORN's activities, Obama campaign counsel Bob Bauer said Friday that the White House had enlisted law enforcement in a "partisan plot" to give credence to a Republican "scare tactic" on the eve of the election.
He noted the parallels with the scandal over the firing of several federal prosecutors, some of whom said they were pressured by the Bush administration to find voter fraud where it couldn't be substantiated. Former New Mexico Attorney General David Iglesias, a Republican appointee, said he was pressed on the eve of the 2006 election to bring fraud cases that he didn't think were legitimate, including some involving ACORN.
The scandal led to the resignation of former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. A Department of Justice inspector general's report found the firings were politically motivated and a special prosecutor now is investigating the matter.
In Nevada, the political equation is scrambled somewhat by the fact that the state's chief elections official who has led the charge against ACORN, Secretary of State Ross Miller, is a Democrat.
"Obviously the issue has been politicized, but that shouldn't detract from the fact that the investigation needed to take place," Miller said. "It was put in place to assure the public that there's integrity in the system and we take this kind of thing seriously. It's important to note that across the country there have been very few cases of fraudulent ballots cast, even with tremendous resources being devoted to finding it."
Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball @reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.
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