ACORN voter registration drive nets charges - Breaking News

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May. 04, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

ACORN voter registration drive nets charges

By ALAN CHOATE
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

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Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto discusses voter registration charges against the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now Inc. (ACORN,) while Secretary of State Ross Miller, left, and Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax look on during a news conference at Sawyer Building today.
Photo by Jeff Scheid.

Law enforcement officials on Oct. 7 raid an office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in Las Vegas.
Photo by Craig L. Moran.

A 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.

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In all, there are 26 charges of compensation for registration of voters and 13 charges of being a “principal” in the incident. An initial hearing has been set for 7:30 a.m. June 3 in Las Vegas Justice Court.

“In Nevada, it is unlawful for a person to provide compensation for registering voters that is based on the total number of voters a person registers,” said state Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto.

ACORN’s canvassers, she said, had to gather at least 20 voter registrations a day to keep their jobs. There was also a bonus program, known as “blackjack” or “21 plus,” which rewarded employees with $5 extra per shift if they brought in 21 or more completed registrations.

Canvassers under pressure to keep their jobs turned in registrations with fake names and phony addresses — even, in one case, the starting lineup for the Dallas Cowboys.

“These practices are clearly a violation of Nevada law,” Cortez Masto said. “By structuring employment and compensation around a quota system, ACORN facilitated voter registration fraud in this state.”

The organization is being targeted, she added, because it shouldn’t “hide behind or place blame on its employees” when the group’s policies required “illegal acts in performing the job.”

Scott Levenson, an ACORN spokesman, said the group cooperated in the investigation and that charging the organization is “frightfully absurd.”

“We’re a bit appalled at the political grandstanding on the part of the attorney general’s office,” he said. “This individual case is truly a situation where, the organization that was most harmed is the organization that is being charged.”

Both he and state officials said that the bonus system was instituted by Edwards, who did not respond to a request for comment Monday. That system was “in violation of ACORN’s national policies,” Levenson said.

“Incentives, bonus systems, are against any training that we do with our employees,” he said. Canvassers also don’t have to meet a strict quota to keep their jobs, he said.

“You expect someone to work,” he said. “If someone walks in every day with 17, their job’s secure. If we have a goal for an employee of 20 registrations, and they keep coming in day after day with two, there’s going to be an issue.”

In an affidavit supporting the charges, an investigator said that both ACORN employees and training materials set out a hard target of 20 registration forms per day for employees to keep their jobs.

“It was the policy of ACORN to terminate from employment canvassers who failed to obtain 20 (voter registration forms) per day,” stated Colin Haynes, an investigator with the Secretary of State’s office.

“However,” he added, “this was not uniformly enforced and it was left to each individual political organizer to deal with any of their canvassers who failed to meet this quota.”

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.”

This voter registration work is not easy, Lomax noted. Canvassers are working in the summer heat and reaching out to people in poorer neighborhoods, all the while making $8 or $9 an hour.

“There’s a huge temptation to take the easy way out,” he said.

ACORN, founded in 1970, is an international community activist group that works on a broad range of issues. Locally, those issues include foreclosure prevention, immigration reform, and concerns in West Las Vegas, a predominantly minority area in central Las Vegas, about the closure of F Street near downtown.

Criticisms of ACORN’s voter registration drives are not new. In previous elections cycles, officials in several states have looked into whether the organization was turning in fake voter registrations, and conservative groups have long criticized the nominally nonpartisan organization as a front for liberal interest groups.

Lomax said he raised concerns about ACORN’s voter registration drive in 2006. “I’ve been trying to get someone to do something about this for a while,” he said.

Bonnie Greathouse, the head organizer at the Las Vegas office, said she wasn’t worried about fallout from the charges.

“We’ve had bad publicity before, and all it does is inform the community that we’re here working for the community,” she said. “People always come forward to our defense.

“We’re just community organizers, just like the president used to be.”

Contact reporter Alan Choate at achoate@reviewjournal.com or 702-229-6435.

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Please enter your name Name: Please enter your email Email: Please enter a comment COMMENTS : (word count limit is 300) You have reached the maximum number of words allowed Current Word Count: Note: Comments made by reporters and editors of the Las Vegas Review-Journal are presented with a yellow background. Report abuse ME wrote on May 18, 2009 03:14 PM: FROM ONE MORON PRESIDENT TO THE NEXT MORON PRESIDENT....I HOPE YOU GUY'S GOT YOUR QURAN READY...CONVERSION IS NEXT WEEK...DON'T BE LATE Report abuse topset72 wrote on May 11, 2009 07:55 PM: John K wrote on May 04, 2009 03:14 PM: "Hey Lilly, When we get congress back, we're really going to make the left pay. NPR funding gone" 98% of NPR's funding doesn't come from the government. Keep listening to fox and pretend you know stuff. Report abuse Oldfart wrote on May 09, 2009 11:20 AM: To quote the article: “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.” NO EVIDENCE OF VOTER FRAUD you right wing 8th grade graduates who can (supposedly) read and write and have jobs. Which means that Obama was elected by 52% of the knowledgeable people of this country despite right wing and Republican attempts to disenfranchise them. Report abuse Brandi wrote on May 09, 2009 10:22 AM: ACORN should be abolished. They are cheating, bullying, irresponsible pieces of trash. The only people coming the their defense are the ones the steal for, but they aren't fooling anybody. Report abuse Rizzo Rizario wrote on May 09, 2009 06:47 AM: "just like the president used to be.” "That my friend is what we are all AFRAID of." HELLO!! People need to quite talking smack about Obama he's not the one that over flowed the toilet, he just happened to be the next inline. The seat was still warm from the guy that did plug it.. If McCain ended up being next in line he could have called Joe The Plumber to unplug it instead of dealing with it himself. Report abuse Jimbo_in_Summerlin wrote on May 08, 2009 06:25 PM: To Thomas Atwood & others: The reason that there seems to be a huge number of "conservative" commentors here on this site is because they can read and write. Note that people who graduated from the 8th grade usually buy newspapers and are not on welfare and have jobs and health insurance and blah blah blah. The disenfranchised that voted for Mr Obama (and we loves Obama!) do not have much of a voice here. Later Jimbo Report abuse Thomas Atwood wrote on May 08, 2009 06:01 PM: Oh yeah, the economic collapse of this country is Obama's fault. The day he stepped into office (January 20, 2009), the country went down the tubes. Are people really this ignorant? Reading through many of these comments, one can feel the (barely alive) pulse of the Jim Crow Conservatives in America: -They do not believe that every American should have the right to vote. -They do not believe in the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". I wonder how many responders to this article were raging mad over hanging chads in Florida in 2000? Or disenfranchised voters in Ohio in 2004? Time to serve yourself a self-serving bowl of sour grapes while you mull over the fact that your party is on its death bed. PS -- I agree with DerekD. If Americans really want to eliminate the corruption, then "vote out the incumbent" at every level of government -- this should be the mantra of every American for the next decade. Vote strictly for lower tier candidates outside the two "bipartisan dictatorship" parties. Conservatives should give the Libertarian Party a chance. Liberals should give the Green Party candidate a chance. The time has come to shake things up. Report abuse mmertz wrote on May 07, 2009 09:05 PM: I had hoped for a better researched article than this. Barely mentioned is that it was ACORN that brought the questionable registrations to the attention of the clerks, and completely ignored is that ACORN is required by law to turn in all registrations, even those they know are fraudulent. This is to prevent voter registration drives from throwing out the registrations of people they don't want to vote, which is exactly what a company was caught doing in California. All registration drives face this dilemma, damned if you do turn in Mickey Mouse and damned if you don't. The reporter should have asked the State Attorney General what ACORN should have done. Report abuse bill warner wrote on May 07, 2009 08:58 PM: Like Bonnie Greathouse says, were community organizers just like the president used to be. Does that mean he is a liar and cheater? Guess so. Report abuse spartacus wrote on May 07, 2009 11:01 AM: Katherine Cortez Masto & David Rogers, two of Nevada's grand-standers. Just a publicity stunt to garner up a little hype to feed the good citizens of Nevada. Both are phony! Read All Comments