ACORN officials said they were stunned by the search because they had unilaterally identified and flagged suspicious voter registration cards to the county elections board starting in July and had been cooperating with authorities to cull bad information and fire workers who collected that information, said Brian Mellor, senior counsel for Project Vote.
Project Vote relies on staff from ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, to do field level voter drives.
ACORN’s internal checks, Mellor said, included tracking forms assigned to canvassers using serial numbers and worker sign-offs on each form and following up with listed voters by phone to verify they had taken part in the registration drive. The search warrant mentions those procedures.
That cooperation and meetings with state officials also are mentioned in the search affidavit, as is a subpoena from the state that was delivered to ACORN in September asking the group to resubmit information on several employees it had previously turned over to county elections officials. The forms were resubmitted, Mellor said.
“The raid was a stunt designed perhaps to make them look tough on voter fraud,” said Matthew Henderson, the southwest regional director for ACORN. “We don’t think fraud is a rampant problem. This was a politically motivated stunt, that is all there is to it because those new voters can reshape the electorate of Nevada.”
Henderson said many voters registered through ACORN are “working people and people of color and there may be corners of the political world where a high injection of new voters like those is unsettling some.”
The state is one of several viewed as a battleground.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail…ces_raided.html