11 accused of faking voter registration cards in Miami-Dade

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By JENNIFER LEBOVICH


jlebovich@MiamiHerald.com

Eleven people hired to register potential voters in Miami-Dade County before last year's presidential election were being sought Wednesday for falsifying hundreds of voter registration cards.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office issued arrest warrants for each of the 11 suspects, all of whom worked for the local chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, (ACORN).
By early Wednesday morning, six were in custody, authorities said.
ACORN came under fire during last year's presidential campaign when Republicans and other conservative groups accused the national

organization of committing fraud in its aggressive voter registration efforts in various cities and counties nationwide, including Florida.

But ACORN officials said they had alerted authorities about the alleged illegal activity among some canvassers in Miami-Dade after finding ``numerous discrepancies'' on voter cards collected from the Homestead area.

The arrests are ``further evidence we've been policing our own folks and report people attempting to commit voter registration fraud,'' said ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring. ``This was really some individuals who were trying to defraud their employer.''

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle praised ACORN.
``We've been very aggressive about a lot of these cases,'' she said. ``But we would not have known about these workers unless ACORN brought it to us.

``It's really minor, ineffectual attempts to justify getting paid an hourly basis. It could not have impacted the voting process whatsoever. Nonetheless, we cannot turn a blind eye to this,'' Rundle added.

ACORN quality control workers found the discrepancies in the cards turned in by 10 canvassers and contacted authorities in June 2008, authorities said. The group turned in 1,400 cards, of which 888 were found to be fraudulent.

An analyst with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement later reviewed a random group of cards, searching databases to find a record of the voter.

The majority of those sampled ``contained registrant information that was not able to be matched to a living person,'' the warrant said.
The workers, who were paid between $8 and $10 an hour, registered names of nonexistent people -- in one case, Paul Newman and James Taylor appeared on cards -- or simply filled out several cards for the same real voter, authorities said.

Those arrested are charged with several counts of false swearing in connection with voting or elections and submission of false voter registration information, both third-degree felonies.

Miami Herald staff writer David Ovalle contributed to this report.

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if it really could not affect the voting process whatsoever , why even do it?

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It is far easier to ignorantly control others than it is to wisely control yourself.

Because if they didn't turn in any voter registrations, they didn't get PAID. It wasn't some huge voter registration scam, it was just some dishonest people who worked for ACORN who wanted to get paid for not working so they falsified registration applications.

They weren't registering any actual people to vote, just making up names and filling out the applications themselves. Nobody voted who wasn't supposed to, because the applications were completely fictional.

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A government big enough to give you everything you want, makes Santa Claus pretty much obsolete.

Oh yeah, ACORN is a model all organizations should follow.

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I can't take that stuff. For some reason, it makes me feel like I'm 5 inches tall and 300 lbs. I'm between 5'8 and 6' and 175 and 200.

Wasn't Obama somehow involved with ACORN?

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It is far easier to ignorantly control others than it is to wisely control yourself.

Here you go, this is the actual Obama-Acorn story:

Not bad at all, and if you are a lawyer in a city and doing a lot of community outreach to get into political office (which you would have to do if you are not say a Kennedy) you would have to lobby far and wide and work with several different groups and meet with several different people, like the link to Ayers who is a well respected college professor.

And as far as linking through different companies. I can be linked to doing business with almost any company out there, because if I buy a service or good from this company, and it has links to that company, then it is the same as Obama buying some advertisements with this company for 800k and it being linked to Acorn. What is the link, and at what point are things coincidental?

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“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.” -Einstein

An even bigger problem that this article is the use of computerized voter machines...we should just stick to paper ballots

Screw that, we need to have a central computer database with this like we do with banks.

We should allow every American to go to the Secretary of State to get a pin number and account number set up, and let them vote at home, and print off their vote with a confirmation number and their votes incase some sort of fraud is suspected.

Paper is easy to 'lose'

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“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.” -Einstein