A Tale of Voter Fraud and Two Democratic Secretaries of State

Every election cycle there are charges and counter-charges related to voter fraud and voter suppression. Republicans fear that Democrats are padding the voter rolls with non-existent or ineligible voters while Democrats claim that Republicans are trying to discourage the disenfranchised from exercising their franchise. As in prior years, much of the focus is on ACORN, the Association of Communities Organized for Reform Now.

ACORN proudly announces that it has registered 1.3 million new voters this year. However, the legitimacy of many of these registrations is in doubt. In Indianapolis, 105% of the eligible voters have registered. In Las Vegas, the starting line-up of the Dallas Cowboys appeared on registration forms submitted by ACORN. In Lake County, Indiana, ACORN turned in 5,000 applications at the last moment which included dead people, a person registered as living at a fast food restaurant and multiple applications signed for different registrants in the same hand. In other instances, the same person has registered up to 72 times at the insistence of ACORN workers.

While ACORN bills itself as a non-partisan organization, the Obama campaign paid it $800,000 for get out the vote operations during the primary elections and ACORN has endorsed Obama. An ACORN worker interviewed by Pelestra.net a student news network, stated that she was registering voters so that they would vote for Obama.

There are currently investigations into ACORN activities in ten battleground states. According to ACORN lawyer Brian Moller, “We believe their purpose is to attack ACORN and suppress votes. We think that by attacking ACORN that they are going to discourage people who have may have registered with ACORN from voting.”

The reaction to ACORN’s questionable activities varies dramatically from state to state. In Las Vegas, where ACORN registered 80,000 new voters including Tony Romo and TO Owens, Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller led an effort to have law enforcement authorities raid ACORN’s office and seize evidence. ACORN responded that this and other investigations were "part of a carefully choreographed campaign to intimidate the largest organization of black and Hispanic poor people in the country."

The story in Ohio was somewhat different. ACCORN claims to have registered 247,335 new voters in this critical swing state. However, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that ACORN officials admitted that they lacked the resources to identify fraudulent registrations.

The response of Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner was rather lethargic. Under the Helping Americans Vote Act, the State was required to enter into an agreement with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to identify discrepancies in voter registrations. The Secretary of State entered into such an agreement. However, when a mismatch occurred, it took no further action other than noting it in its records. The Secretary of State claimed that county boards of elections could perform this task, but had to admit that they had no ability to search the records to find non-conforming records. In other words, the Secretary of State would search for voter registrations which did not match up to the state’s database and then took no further action to investigate fraudulent registrations. The United States District Court concluded that Secretary of State Brunner was violating the law.

Based upon this information, it is clear to the Court that Defendant is not in compliance with HAVA, which requires matching for the purpose of verifying the identity of the voter before counting that person’s vote. As Plaintiffs have argued, the State is not verifying the voter registration information for entries when there is a mismatch, and the county boards of elections are not able to investigate the mismatches to determine voter eligibility because they have no effective way to identify or isolate the mismatches from the rest of the pile. Under this system, HAVA’s matching and verification requirements serve no identifiable purpose and are rendered meaningless.

Opinion and Order, Ohio Republican Party, et al vs. Jennifer, Case No. 2:08-cv-00913 (S.D. Ohio 10/9/08), p. 11.

Secretary Brunner’s attempts to comply with the letter but not the spirit of the law might be justified were it not for other examples of partisan bias. Secretary Brunner tried to disallow absentee ballots submitted by the McCain campaign for the reason that a box not required by law had not been checked. The Ohio Supreme Court ordered her to count the ballots. Additionally, Secretary Brunner had to be restrained from excluding observers from locations conducting same day voter registration and early voting.

While ACORN claims that it is merely helping the underprivileged to vote, it seems likely that hundreds of thousands of false voter registration forms are being submitted. If state officials turn a blind eye to these applications, as almost happened in Ohio, it stands to reason that some number of fraudulent votes would be cast. In a close election, the integrity of the system requires that election officials carefully scrutinize voter registrations to ensure that one man, one vote does not turn into one man, dozens of votes. When partisan organizations like ACORN facilitate fraudulent registrations (which certainly appears to be happening), election officials and law enforcement should be diligent rather than turning a blind eye.