Court documents reveal ACORN's troubled history

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Republican officials and advisers to Sen. John McCain have accused ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) of rampant voter-registration fraud. Indeed, officials in states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Indiana and Connecticut now are looking into accusations that ACORN workers turned in thousands of fraudulent or duplicate voter-registration applications. (The Dallas Cowboys magically filled out voter registration forms in Nevada, for example.)

So what exactly is ACORN’s track record in registering new voters? It hasn’t always been pretty. Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from recent court documents and public testimony in three states that have examined ACORN’s hiring practices over the past two years.

Nevada 2008
On October 6, a criminal investigator with the Nevada Secretary of State filed a search-warrant affidavit stating that ACORN workers used “fictitious and false information” on voter registration applications. Among the allegations:

--ACORN hired 59 state prison inmates to collect voter-registration forms. One was Jason Anderson, who currently is imprisoned for burglary and firearms violations at the state’s Casa Grande halfway house in Las Vegas, court records show. Anderson, who became a supervisory “team leader” for ACORN, told state investigators that some of his co-workers “hired by ACORN were ‘lazy crack-heads’ who were not interested in working and just wanted the money.” Anderson is the whistleblower who told state investigators that his inmate colleagues had registered the Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada, along with “large numbers” of other fictitious applications.

--Another ACORN worker, Darmela Jones, said “she submitted approximately 40 Voter Registration Applications while employed at ACORN and only 10 were real applications.” Her excuse? Jones said “it was very hot outside while she was getting people to complete a form.”

--Yet another ACORN canvasser “was caught completing forms using names and addresses copied from the telephone book.”

-- Investigators also identified a Nevada woman, Roberta Casteel, who had not registered to vote but whose voter-registration application was submitted to the state by ACORN.  How, then, did the ACORN workers find her name, driver’s license number and Social Security number? Here’s one clue: Casteel’s purse was stolen last year, she said. Now how would state inmates living in a halfway house know about that?

Ohio 2008
Election officials in Ohio’s most populous county asked a prosecutor Monday to investigate alleged voter-registration fraud. One local man, Freddie Johnson of Cleveland, testified before the bipartisan Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that ACORN workers encouraged him to sign 73 voter registration forms—all in his own name.

“They get paid off a signature,” he said. “So they just needed a signature and told me I wasn’t going to get into trouble.”

In an interview with the Cleveland NBC station, WKYC,  after the hearing, Johnson said the ACORN workers paid him a few bucks and gave him a few cigarettes in exchange for the multiple signatures. ACORN said the workers in question were fired.

Washington State 2007
The King County Prosecutor’s Office filed criminal charges last year against seven ACORN workers accused of submitting 1,762 fraudulent voter registrations to the state in 2006. The workers--many of whom had prior convictions-- went to the Seattle Public Library and filled out forms “based on names, addresses and telephone numbers taken from the telephone books,” state prosecutor Daniel Satterberg said.

In addition, one of the canvassers paid $8 an hour by ACORN “said it was hard work making up all those cards,” according to a probable-cause statement by a King County Sheriff’s detective. Another ACORN worker boasted “he would often sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out cards,” the statement said.

Several of the Seattle-based ACORN workers had criminal histories prior to their employment. One had pleaded guilty to second-degree child molestation, and another had pleaded guilty to harassment for writing a bomb-threat note. Yet another had a crack-cocaine problem.

“We believe that ACORN’s internal quality control procedures were not just deficient but entirely non-existent,” Satterberg said. “This was an act of vandalism against our voter rolls.”

ACORN Responds
In an interview today with NBC News, ACORN spokesman Charles Jackson defended the group’s voter-registration drives. “Our system works,” he said. “I don’t know what more we can do.”

Jackson said that ACORN itself had identified most of the fraudulent or duplicative registration forms this campaign year, and not state officials. He said the error rate of the 1.3 million voters registered was “a very small percentage.” And he defended the hiring of inmates in Nevada.

“We believe in giving people a second chance,” Jackson said. “We thought we had a system in place to check it.”