DAPHNE EVIATAR, AM LAW DAILY
Brian Mellor didn’t intend to be a criminal defense lawyer when he went to law school some 28 years ago.
“I was going to use my legal skills to help people use the law,” says Mellor, senior counsel for Project Vote, which is organizing the legal defense of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. The embattled group’s voter-registration efforts have forced him to use those skills in ways he never imagined.
In the final weeks of the campaign, ACORN employees have come under criminal investigation in at least eight states for alleged voter-registration fraud; ACORN itself has been sued in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania; and ACORN has reportedly become the subject of an FBI investigation. Republican presidential candidate John McCain has gone so far as to charge that ACORN “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.”
Mellor, who has worked as a community organizer, a representative of the National Treasury Employees Union, a partner in a small plaintiffs’ firm and a manager of an organization fighting predatory lending practices, is now working with lawyers around the country to fend off these charges. Those lawyers include local counsel in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Nevada as well as attorneys in the Washington, D.C., office of Williams & Connolly. (The firm declined to discuss its work for Project Vote and ACORN with The American Lawyer.)
“The story out there is flat-out not true,” Mellor tells The Am Law Daily about the wave of allegations against ACORN. “Project Vote and ACORN are registering the hardest people to register. I don’t see the board of elections doing that work. They’re not doing their job, so we’re doing it for them.”
“You have to hire a lot of people,” he continues. “And we can’t pay a lot of money. We pay $8 an hour. It’s a huge organization that has to be set up and run. We have very strong procedures in place. Every canvasser gets trained, every canvasser signs a statement saying they understand what fraud is. Every card that comes back gets reviewed by a separate office.”
Mellor emphasizes those procedures because ACORN has been accused of allowing–and in some cases organizing–its employees to submit to local election authorities tens of thousands of false, incomplete, or fraudulent registration forms.
At a hearing last Wednesday on the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s motion for a special injunction against ACORN and the Secretary of the Commonwealth, for example, former Project Vote employee Anita Moncrief testified that the group provided minimal training for its workers and fired employees if they didn’t meet a quota of 20 new voter applications per day. If workers were caught submitting false applications, she added, ACORN “threw them under the bus”–treating them as scapegoats and letting them face the legal consequences on their own.
Moncrief was fired in January after using a Project Vote credit card to pay for personal items. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, she is now unemployed. The lawyer who represented ACORN at the hearing, Katheryn Simpson, also brought out on cross-examination that Moncrief, who lives in Virginia, never actually helped register voters in Pennsylvania.
“What angers me most about all of these stories is we turned cards in and asked for prosecutions back in February and March,” says Mellor. “I personally sent letters to every single board of elections saying we’re going to turn in these problematic cards, if you want to pursue them, call me.”
Many states require organizations that gather voter registrations to turn all of the forms in, even if they appear problematic, so as not to thwart anyone’s right to register. It is ACORN’s policy, Mellor says, to flag any that look fishy. And in a move that is consistent with that policy, he says, ACORN recently acknowledged that about 30 percent of the 1.3 registrations its volunteers turned in across the country were invalid–duplicate, incomplete or simply made up by employees who didn’t want to do the work of registering real live voters. Invalid registrations flagged by ACORN have included the names of Mickey Mouse and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.
Mellor and others who defend Project Vote and ACORN stress the difference between voter-registration fraud (committed by employees who are effectively stealing their wages from ACORN) and vote fraud (a crime that involves one person impersonating another at the polls). Most studies show that the latter is extremely rare.
Maurice Thompson, staff attorney with the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, which is suing ACORN in Ohio, disagrees.
“In the past we’ve seen deceased individuals miraculously show up to vote,” Thompson says, though he failed to cite any specific examples. “I’m fairly certain that we’re going to find instances of individuals voting who should not be voting.”
So far, ACORN was vindicated in the one registration-fraud lawsuit against the group to be ruled on to date. On Thursday, a Pennsylvania court denied the Republican party’s motion for a special injunction that would have required ACORN to turn over every voter registration card it collected, and would have forced Pennsylvania election officials to check identification for all first-time voters.
In Ohio, the Buckeye Institute is asking for the dissolution of ACORN. Thompson says his group also is prepared to challenge any votes cast on Tuesday that they suspect may be fraudulent.
“Kind of like our southern border with Mexico, while our border patrol catches immigrants fairly frequently, they aren’t catching everybody, obviously,” he says. “As guardians of the border of free elections, we will bring voter fraud to the attention of authorities.”
Sounds like Brian Mellor and his growing legal team will be busy for a long time after election day.
Read read original AM Law Daily story here.