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To: Interested Parties
From: Bertha Lewis and Steve Kest
Date: October 10, 2008
Re: The Truth About ACORN’s Voter Registration Drive
Election Day is less than a month away, and our efforts to make sure that low-income and minority voters have a voice and vote on November 4th are in full swing. Unfortunately, just as we’ve seen in previous election cycles, the more success we have in empowering these voters, the more attacks we have to fend off from partisan forces making unfounded accusations to disparage our work and help maintain the status quo of an unbalanced electorate.
After a similar spate of charges against ACORN in 2006, we learned that then-Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales had fired Republican US Attorneys because they refused to prosecute ACORN for trumped up fraud charges. This was the heart of the US Atttorneygate scandal that led Karl Rove, Gonzales and other top Department of Justice officials to resign.
On Monday, October 6, as voter registration deadlines passed in most states, ACORN completed the largest, most successful nonpartisan voter registration drive in history. In partnership with the nonpartisan organization Project Vote, we helped register over 1.3 million low-income, minority, and young voters in a total of 21 states. Highlights of this success include:
We are proud of this unprecedented success, and grateful to everyone who supported us in this massive effort, from our funders and partners to the literally thousands of hardworking individuals across the country who dedicated themselves to the cause and conducted the difficult work of registering 1.3 million Americans, one voter at a time.
In the course of this work, we hired more than 12,000 registration workers to help people register.
As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift. Any large voter registration operation will have some workers who turn in bogus registration forms – not because the “Mickey Mouse” whose name they put on a registration form will ever attempt to vote on Election Day, but because they want to get paid without earning it. Only a small fraction of the workers we hire try to defraud ACORN in this way, but we obviously have a big stake in making sure people know we will turn them in and encourage prosecution when we catch them.
When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. But for some reason, when ACORN turns voter registration workers over to the authorities for filling out bogus forms, it gets accused of “voter fraud.” This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, the act is outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated.
As The Nation pointed out recently, ACORN’s success in registering millions of low-income and minority
voters has made it “something of a right-wing bogeyman.” Though ACORN believes that the right to vote is not, and should never be, a partisan issue, attacks from groups threatened by our historic success continue to come, motivated by partisan politics and often perpetuated by the media without full investigation of the facts.
These stories typically lump together “ incomplete” voter registration cards (applications missing key
information) with “erroneous” or “fraudulent” voter registration applications. These distinctions are important, yet few media outlets discuss them. Predictably, however, partisan forces have tried to use these isolated incidents to incite fear of the “bogeyman” of “widespread voter fraud.” But we want to take this opportunity to set the record straight and tell you a few facts to show how these incidents really exemplify everything that ACORN is doing right:
Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.
Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in,.
Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of
deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.
Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card . ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for
deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.
Fact: No criminal charges related to voter registration have ever been brought against ACORN or partner organizations. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes — evidence which in most cases WE called to the attention of authorities
Fact: There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work. Think of the risk someone would have to be motivated to take. They would be a sitting duck to be nabbed and prosecuted.
Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN’s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.
Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered and allowed to vote, so there is also NO incentive to “disrupt the system” with phony cards.
Fact: Similar accusations were made, and attacks launched, against ACORN and other voter registration
organizations in 2004 and 2006. These attacks were not only groundless, they have since been exposed as part of the U.S. Attorneygate scandal and revealed to be part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression.
Unfortunately, at this time of year, partisan forces and politicians seeking to portray themselves as “fraud-busters” can’t resist the temptation to try again. As David Iglesias (former Republican US Attorney in New Mexico who was forced from office) has said, he refused Karl Rove’s and Alberto Gonzales pressure to charge ACORN with voter fraud, because he knew ACORN was innocent of that charge. And another US Attorney, Bradley Schlozman, who did politicize prosecutions against former ACORN canvassers, was forced to acknowledge under cross examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee that ACORN was the victim of fraud by its employees and ACORN had caught the employees and had identified them to law enforcement.
These are the facts, and the truth is that a relatively small group of political operatives are trying to orchestrate hysteria about “voter fraud” and manufacture public outrage that they can use to justify fraudulently challenging voters at the polls and other schemes to suppress the votes of millions of low-income and minority Americans.
These tactics are nothing new, and history has shown that they will come to nothing. We’ll continue to weather the storm, as we’ve done for years, and we’ll continue to share the truth about our work and express pride about our accomplishments.
Most importantly, we want to assure you that this good work continues, unabated and undeterred. ACORN will not be intimidated, we will not be provoked, and in this important moment in history we will not allow anyone to distract us from these vital efforts to empower our constituencies and our communities to speak for themselves. If the partisan political machines are afraid of low-income and minority voters, they’re going to have to do a lot better than coming after ACORN.
Our work is far from over: now begins our effort to mobilize these new voters around local and national issues, getting them to the polls and helping to channel their commitment and conviction into an ongoing movement for change in our communities.
After all, there are now at least 1.3 million more registered voters in this country, and they will not be silenced.
They’re taking an interest, and taking a stand, and they’ll be taking their concerns to the voting booth in November.
And ACORN will be here, to make sure that the voices of these Americans are heard, on Election Day and for every day to come.
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