Not this Democrat.
Posted on 07/27/2007 3:11:06 PM PDT by Baladas
SEATTLE (AP) - King County prosecutors filed felony charges Thursday against seven people in what a top official described as the worst case of voter-registration fraud in state history, while the organization they worked for agreed to keep a better eye on its employees and pay $25,000 to defray costs of the investigation.
The seven submitted about 1,800 registration cards last fall on behalf of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which had hired them at $8 an hour to sign people up to vote, according to charging documents filed in Superior Court.
Secretary of State Sam Reed told a news conference it was clearly Washington's most serious instance of voter registration fraud.
"This was an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls of King County," said Dan Satterberg, the interim King County prosecutor.
Satterberg, Reed and other officials stressed that the defendants were motivated by financial gain rather than any desire to toy with the outcome of an election. They said that in one sense, ACORN was victimized because it paid for voter-registration work that was never performed.
But in interviews with King County Sheriff's Detective Chris Johnson, several of the defendants - while freely admitting they forged the forms - insisted that they had been told ACORN would shut down their office in Tacoma if they didn't improve their numbers, Johnson wrote in a probable cause statement.
One, Ryan Olson, said another worker in the office told him "do what you have to do" to turn in more cards.
ACORN's oversight of the workers was virtually nonexistent - to the extent that civil charges could have been warranted, Satterberg said.
In a settlement agreement announced Thursday, ACORN, which cooperated with the investigation, agreed to pay $25,000 and to make improvements in its management, training and oversight of suspect voter registrations throughout the state.
Acting Seattle U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said he believes the agreement could become a model for other states in dealing with organizations like ACORN.
"Voter registration is a vital part of our work to increase civic participation," said John Jones, president of Washington ACORN. "We need to continue to do that work, and do all that we can to make sure that no one is trying to pull a fast one on us, and creating problems for the registrations, to get money they haven't earned. We will be working closely with county officials to do that."
ACORN, founded in 1970, has run voter registration drives across the country, with allegations of fraudulent registrations surfacing in several states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and Colorado in recent years.
The Washington state probe began after King County election workers in October spotted apparently forged voter-registration cards among about 1,800 that were turned in by ACORN. The cards arrived a day after they were due for the November election.
Election officials feared that tossing all of the registrations could inadvertently disenfranchise any potentially legitimate voters in the batch. So they allowed the names to appear on the rolls for subsequent elections, including an advisory vote on replacing Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct in March.
But they flagged those names and tried to verify them using other state databases. Only six turned out to be legitimate voters, Satterberg said. The King County canvassing board agreed to remove many of the rest - 1,762 - from the rolls Thursday, satisfied they were fraudulent.
Investigators determined that no votes were cast from the fraudulent voter registrations.
Charging papers said that in many cases, the ACORN workers flipped through phone books or baby-name books at the Seattle Public Library, picking names from one page and addresses from another.
Frequently they listed homeless shelters as the addresses, requiring shelter staff to spend hours going through their records to determine whether any of the people had actually lived there.
None of the defendants could immediately be reached for comment. Some had unlisted phone numbers or numbers that had been changed, while others did not return messages seeking comment.
Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the King County prosecutor's office, said he did not know whether any had obtained attorneys.
The defendants are:
-Tina Marie Johnson, 24, of Tacoma, and Jayson Lee Woods, 19, of Elkridge, Md., who each face eight counts of providing false information on a voter registration, a felony punishable by up to one year in prison.
-Clifton Eugene Mitchell, 44, of Lakewood, the political organizer in the Tacoma ACORN office at the time of the alleged wrongdoing last August and September, and Olson, 28, of Needle, Calif., each face two counts of the same.
-Robert Greene, 56, of Tacoma, and Kendra Thill, 18, a transient who has not been located, face one count apiece.
-Brianna Debwa, 35, the quality control specialist in the office, faces one count of providing false information on a registration, and one count of making false statements to a public official.
Dumb question time: what party did the above vote for?
$8.00/ hour doesn't sound like a "livable wage" to me! (f$%king hypocrite pinko scum)
In a related story::::from James Taranto’s Best of the Web column in the OpinionJournal today:
Cracking a Nut Case
On March 16, the New York Times published an editorial titled “Phony Fraud Charges,” cheering on Democrats who were trying to gin up a scandal over President Bush’s firing of several federal prosecutors:
In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. . . .
John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”
Those folks need to get a grip. They are always in some kind of trouble. Even the Dems must be sick to death of them by now.
They hire minimum-wage flunkies to fill out registration cards, they don't care if it's winos, dead people or completely fabricated people.
And yes, they are all DEMOCRATS. They are cheating on purpose. It's what the organization does; invent more Democrats so straw voters can cheat.
That’s some funny stuff, they cheat and still lose 2 elections.
Not this Democrat.
Good now hang them.
If you hear it from the Democrats, including Hillary and most other candidates, the Dems WON the past 2 elections. Hillary said so herself on TV recently.
I noticed the AP’s bias right away....no mention of the party....we then know it is Democrats for sure.
The D’s own Washington. After the gross vote fraud in 2004, not even the Republican Secretary of State would stand up against the crookedness of the Washington Homocrat party.
The D’s cut the balls off the R’s in Washington long ago, and now march with them in a sack down the streets in every pervert pride parade.
Washington Republicans can’t even identify an issue to take the leftist Homocrats to task on.
Pathetic.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.