WASHINGTON, DC – On Friday Project Vote and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) held a news conference to discuss the importance of voter registration and to respond to partisan allegations of fraudulent registrations.
According to Brian Kettenring, the Head Organizer of Florida ACORN and a national spokesperson for the organization, the joint registration program operated in 21 states, employed over 13,000 paid workers, and cost approximately $18 million. Helping to register over 1.3 million Americans, the 2008 nonpartisan drive might be the largest and most successful effort to register low-income and minority citizens in U.S. history, Kettenring said.
“I can’t emphasize enough how challenging it is to undertake a project of this size,” said Kettenring, “but there’s been an incredible response…People are yearning to see things be different, and they’re yearning to find a way to get involved.”
Long-time voting rights activist and ACORN board member Carmen Arias confirmed that the interest and excitement from voters this year was without precedent. “In 2004 I did voter registration work, and we literally had to convince people that they needed to exercise their civic duty and vote. The basic answer we got was ‘Why bother? Nobody cares. What I say doesn’t make any difference”…But this year has been absolutely awe-inspiring, the excitement that is out there.”
The success of program in helping to reach low-income Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, and young people has made it the target of partisan attacks, according to ACORN and Project Vote. “If you can’t stop the message—if you can’t stop the 1.3 million people from getting on the rolls—at least shoot the messenger,” Kettenring said. “There’s an effort to politicize the act of people getting involved in the process.”
The partisan attacks center on a small number of faulty or phony registration cards submitted by ACORN canvassers. Michael Slater, executive director for the voting rights group Project Vote, said that at the end of the day the cards in question will represent “well under 1%” of the 1.3 million total registrations submitted through the drive, and are merely the result of “canvassers who don’t take their jobs very seriously, and think they can pass off false work and get paid for a couple of days, with no consequences.”
Slater sees nothing new in the partisan attacks. “This is the third election cycle in a row where we’ve seen partisan interests take the same issue—which is canvassers trying to defraud ACORN by not doing their work and instead fabricating applications—and trying to exaggerate that and turn it into an argument that there is ‘widespread fraudulent voting’ going on…These allegations have been debunked now in several election cycles, and we’ll find by the end of this election cycle they’ll be debunked as well.”
Slater emphasized that the investigations were not against ACORN itself, but against former ACORN workers that ACORN had identified, fired, and fingered for law-enforcement. “This is an instance where employees are defrauding ACORN,” said Slater. “No one accuses Wal-Mart of consumer fraud when an employee steals from the store, and that’s exactly what’s happening here…To treat it like voter fraud, or to treat it like an election crime or a crime against the voters is not the case. ACORN is the victim, and they’re being victimized twice in all of this.
ACORN spokesperson Scott Levenson also made the point that the term “voter fraud” does not apply to these cases. “There haven’t been any cases where anyone even suggested that someone attempted to vote under these circumstances,” said Levenson. “There are reports of professional football players like ‘Troy Aikman’ being falsely registered to vote. To suggest that ‘Troy Aikman’ is going to actually come to the voting place, and make up an ID, and vote as him is patently absurd. There are no votes that are really in question here.”
According to Kettenring there has never been a single instance where a falsified voter registration application was traced to an ineligible vote being cast. “The Republican general counsel Sean Cairncross was asked by the media last week if he was aware of any cases, and he said ‘no.’”
Kettenring said that ACORN does not claim a voter registration program this size could ever be perfect, but that the attention being paid is “tremendously disproportionate to the problem, and is distracting from a litany of other issues that are in danger of threatening our democracy.”
According to Project Vote, which monitors legislation that threatens to disenfranchise voters, those other issues include laws that make it harder for people to vote. “We know that trying to generate news coverage around supposed ‘voter fraud’ has been used in the past to drum up support for restrictive voter laws, particularly voter ID laws and restrictions on voter registration drives,” said Slater. “We also believe that it is designed to set up challenges to voters on Election Day, and we just saw all of this rhetoric and news coverage in Ohio as a justification for additional screening of voters. It’s a clear strategy to justify making voting more restrictive, despite the fact that there’s no evidence of fraudulent voting.”
Kettenring also said that it was unfortunate that so little attention has been given to the 1.3 million voters who were changing the face of the American electorate, and so much attention had been paid to those trying to attack, harm, and slow down ACORN’s work.
“Our task,” Kettenring continued, “is to keep doing our work, and to keep articulating the message: that we’re the organization that’s fighting for working families, decent fair quality housing, living wages, and for everybody to be able to participate in the voting process in America. There’s nothing more patriotic, there’s nothing more inspirational, and there’s nothing more important.”