ACORN efforts in Schenectady not hurt by scandal

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Perhaps it’s lucky that playgrounds and street lights have kept the local ACORN chapter so busy this year.

The chapter had too much on its plate to push voter registration as well, so the Association of Communities Organizing for Reform Now didn’t hire an army of locals to persuade residents to register to vote.

That has allowed it to remain untouched by this year’s scandal in which some ACORN workers in other states allegedly faked registrations and flooded boards of elections with hundreds of suspicious new voter cards.

But upstate organizing Director Harold Miller knows full well the pain his colleagues are going through elsewhere as they are accused of hijacking the democratic process with fraudulent registrations.

He’s gone through it himself in past elections.

“I have fired folks for doing that,” he said of workers who write “Mickey Mouse” or turn in a hundred names with the same handwriting.

The problem, he said, is at its root caused by the way ACORN operates. The grass-roots organization believes that hiring full-time workers gets better results. In Schenectady, it pays community organizers to walk the streets, surveying residents to get a list of unresolved issues. Those full-time workers then organize a professional campaign to resolve each problem.

The system works — in Schenectady this year, ACORN got the city to fix dozens of broken streetlights in crime-ridden neighborhoods and make nearly 20 improvements to Jerry Burrell Park. Most recently, it successfully lobbied for city Assistant Police Chief Mark Chaires to be promoted to chief.

But when the same principle is applied to voter registration, ACORN regularly runs into trouble.

Unlike some agencies, which gather volunteers to seek out new voters, ACORN pays its workers by the hour. They’re sent out separately to canvass primarily poor areas where few residents have bothered to register in the past. To cover more ground, they work alone.

When the going gets tough — or they simply don’t want to do the work — some of them fill out dozens of cards themselves, trying to make it look like they’re working, Miller said.

“You get people, especially if you pay them, who put in Mickey Mouse just to say, ‘Oh, I turned in five cards,’ ” Miller said.

ACORN now requires its unsupervised workers to turn in their cards daily so that fraud can be caught quickly. Usually, Miller said, the fraudulent cards are so obvious that supervisors notice them at once.

“They’re immediately fired,” he said. “I have fired folks. But I’m still required to turn in the cards.”

He said ACORN separates out the suspect registration cards and gives them to the local Board of Elections, while also calling police to prosecute the worker. The hardest part, he said, is turning in cards he’s sure are fakes.

“We cannot shred these cards. We cannot discard them. We have to turn them in, even the ones we know are bad,” he said. “We tell the Board of Elections those cards are bad. We meet with them. But it’s up to them to decide which ones can be thrown out.”

VOTER PROTECTION

Laws requiring all voter registration cards to be turned in were designed to protect voters. After all, Miller said, a worker who faked 19 cards might have also actually gotten one real person to register.

“There may be one,” he said. “So we have to turn them in.”

He said ACORN shouldn’t be judged by the fraud any more than a company should be condemned if it hired a worker who stole from the cash register.

“That’s what I equate it to, you having someone who works in a store and may steal from the cash register,” he said, arguing that despite a company’s best efforts, a few bad apples will slip in.

The big difference is that when ACORN’s workers break the law, they create weeks of work for government officials, who must sort through the cards and make the difficult decision of which ones to throw out.

At this time of year, that task is made worse by two deadlines. First, the next election is less than three weeks away, so decisions must be made quickly. Secondly, if any of those decisions are wrong, residents will have little chance to fix the error — in most states, including New York, the deadline to register for this year’s election has passed.

Miller also stressed that only a fraction of ACORN’s work force broke the law: out of 13,000 registration recruiters, about 200 were fired for fraud this year, he said.

“The vast majority of the 13,000 go out every day and do their work properly,” he said.

But the ones who don’t have turned in thousands of false cards in at least three states.

One of the biggest incidents occurred this summer in Washington state. Seven ACORN workers were charged with felonies in what prosecutors called the biggest voter registration fraud case in the state’s history. According to media reports, the workers turned in 1,762 false voter cards in an effort to earn their ACORN salary.

Miller defended paying voter registration workers even though he acknowledged that the salary is what encourages some to break the law. After all, they would have little motive to turn in fraudulent cards if they weren’t receiving money for their labor — but ACORN might end up with far fewer workers.

“We believe in giving low-income people a chance to do something good in the community,” he said. “I think our organization has done a phenomenal job overall. In the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve registered 1.3 million people.”

Upstate New York may face some of the pain of that registration power in two years. For the 2010 gubernatorial election, Miller plans to run a large registration drive here.

But he promised that it would not be as problematic as other drives were this year.

“Obviously we’re going to make changes to our quality control, like we do every year,” he said.