Beleaguered ACORN fighting back

ACORN, the activist group accused of voter fraud in 15 states, went on the offensive today, accusing Republicans of trying to suppress turnout on Election Day.

Hugh Alleyne, an ACORN board member, told reporters at Washington’s National Press Club that the group would take the fight to its critics.

“All Americans should be applauding the great accomplishments that people are making to register people to vote,” said Mr. Alleyne. “Recently we have seen John McCain and the Republican Party attack these community registration drives, put barriers up for those voters, challenged election officials and filed lawsuits in an effort to thwart these new voters.”

ACORN — which stands for Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now — describes itself as a nonpartisan organization of activists dedicated to social reform, but the group and its tactics have come under fire from election officials and from the GOP especially in recent weeks.

The McCain campaign has said ACORN shares the blame for the mortgage crisis because the group bullied banks to dispense high-risk loans.

Mr. Alleyne and other ACORN officials said today that ACORN, with the help of the ACLU, has filed two lawsuits on behalf of voters who say the GOP is violating privacy and election law to suppress turnout.

“These are the folks that are hammering in the fabric of our democracy,” Mr. Alleyne said. “Not ACORN and its efforts to get people to register to vote.”

ACORN has ties to Sen. Barack Obama, who worked with the organization while he was a community organizer and lawyer in Illinois.

ACORN claims to have registered 1.3 million voters this year, but critics say as much as a third of the registrations are fraudulent — a charge that Sreve Krest, ACORN’s executive director, denied.

“First of all, it was one of the most careful registration drives on such a large scale that’s ever been carried out,” said Steve Kest, ACORN’s executive director. “We identified all new voters. All new cards that came in were called up to three times and identified almost all of the cases of the problematic cards. We are required by law in most states to turn in those cards. We called them ’problematic cards,’ segregated them and turned them in separately.”

Mr. Kest accused the GOP of intimidating new voters with “improper voter challenges.” More than 6,000 voters were challenged in Montana based on changes of address, he said, and many of those registrations were from voters in the military or students who had their mail forwarded to other addresses.

Mr. Kest said Republicans tried to “trick” California residents by having the residents “sign a petition” that would strengthen penalties on child molesters.

“Even the general council of the RNC cannot cite a single example of an improper vote being cast due to voter registration fraud,” Mr. Kest said. “We think really what this is doing is masking the real problem of voter supression.”

Election officials in states across the country are investigating allegations of fraud among ACORN registration drives. ACORN offices were raided in Nevada after registrations for Dallas Cowboy football players turned up, and in Ohio, officials are looking into a case in which one man registered four dozen times through ACORN.