Republicans suspect ACORN involved in voter fraud

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By focusing attention on false voter registration forms filed by the liberal group ACORN, Republicans and Arizona Sen. John McCain are raising alarm bells about the potential for widespread voter fraud this fall.But some election experts say the chances for significant voter fraud in November are slim. Most of the false or duplicate names -- such as "Mickey Mouse" and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys -- are already being struck from voter rolls by election boards. Election experts say that while there have been isolated cases of voter fraud in recent history, it's virtually impossible to pull off large-scale voter fraud without being discovered."Is it going to cause headaches for election officials? Yes," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School and a specialist in election law. "Are they going to have duplicate or false names in their registration databases? Yes. Is it going to change the election outcome? No. ... Duplicate registrations don't lead to fraudulent votes being cast. You don't get Joe Montana voting 400 times even if he's registered 400 times in San Francisco."McCain used Wednesday's final presidential debate to try to tie Obama to the controversy over ACORN, The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has endorsed the Democrat for president and registered 1.3 million voters over the last two years. McCain said the group is "now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country." He also alluded to the fact that Obama's campaign had paid a firm affiliated with ACORN $800,000 earlier this year for get-out-the-vote efforts.Obama downplayed his ties to the group, noting that he represented ACORN as a lawyer in the mid-1990s in a lawsuit to force Illinois to implement a federal law allowing voters to register to vote when they applied for a driver's license. Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a group that tracks election reform issues, said the skirmish over ACORN is part of a long-running battle between the parties, with Republicans demanding tougher rules on voter registration to prevent voter fraud and Democrats warning against efforts that could knock legitimate voters off the rolls."ACORN has become a rope in the tug of war between the two parties over voter registration," Chapin said.He said there's little evidence to back up claims of massive voter fraud or voter suppression efforts this year. He said both parties are jockeying for political and legal advantage with court challenges looming in battleground states over who is and who isn't eligible to vote.The GOP won a round on Tuesday when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, must set up new checks to verify whether new voters are eligible. Ohio Republicans are also helping voters sue local election boards over registration rules and absentee ballot requests.Republicans are likely to keep the focus on the allegations against ACORN. In Philadelphia, city officials have identified at least 8,000 suspicious ballots turned in by the group, and 1,500 have been handed over to the district attorney's office. In Nevada, the group hired 59 prisoners to collect voter registration forms and one prisoner told authorities that inmates filled out many false names, including the Cowboys football roster, because they "were not interested in working and just wanted to make money."In Ohio, a Cleveland man told a local election board that ACORN workers urged him to sign 73 different voter registration forms -- all in his own name. The workers involved have since been fired.ACORN officials insist that the vast majority of their registration cards were accurate. "Out of 13,000 workers, there were inevitably a few who decided they'd try to pad their hours by duplicating a card and filling out another one or making up a name," said Kevin Whelan, an organizer for the group in Minneapolis. He added that ACORN officials will alert election boards to forms that look suspect.Stephen Weir, the clerk-recorder and registrar of voters for Contra Costa County and the former president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said large voter registration drives often produce some false or duplicate registrations. But he noted that election officials have systems in place to make sure each voter is eligible.The Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002 after the 2000 election debacle in Florida, required that new voter registrations include a "unique identifier" -- a driver's license number or the last four digits of the Social Security number -- to verify the voter's identity. "It's not like you can just make this stuff up and, voila, you are a registered voter," Weir said. "You've got to be pretty clever to steal an 'identifier' to steal a vote. You have to have one of those identifiers. If you don't, that's going to stop the process."E-mail Zachary Coile at zcoile(at)sfchronicle.com.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)