Ballots cast in Houston using dead voters’ names

By

Lee Ann O’Neal

| Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Thousands on the rolls after death, creating potential for fraud

Woodwick Street was quiet — with a few residents working in their yards and adding to post-storm brush piles at the curb — when Texas Watchdog visited on a recent Saturday to try to find Harris County voter Linda K. Hill.

“I’m sorry, but she passed on two years ago,” said a mustached man wearing a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap and driving a motorized chair down the street. He was Linda Hill’s husband, Henderson Hill Jr.

She is among the more than 4,000 people whose names are listed both on Harris County’s voter rolls and also in a federal database of death records, a Texas Watchdog analysis has found.

And dozens of those people, like Linda Hill, have apparently cast ballots from beyond the grave, records since 2004 show. One expert says the number of deceased names used to cast ballots may be higher than what Texas Watchdog’s analysis found.

Instances of dead voters’ names being used to cast ballots were most frequent in three elections, the November 2004 general election, the November 2006 general election and the March 2008 Democratic primary, the analysis found.

And 4,000 voters isn’t chump change, even though the figure is a tiny fraction of Harris County’s 1.9 million registered voters.

Elections have been decided by less: By fewer than 300 votes, Andres Pereira edged out Bruce Mosier to win the Democratic nomination for 190th District judge in March. Democrat Hubert Vo squeaked by Republican Talmadge Heflin in 2004 to win a state House seat by 33 votes, according to an official recount. And George W. Bush actually won Florida by 1,665 votes in 2000, according to a hand recount after the election commissioned by USA Today, the Miami Herald and Knight Ridder.

Even one wrong record, his wife’s, worries Henderson Hill.

Speaking in the dining room of the home in the East Little York/Homestead neighborhood where the couple moved in 1976, Hill said he didn’t know why or how the county would have recorded his late wife as voting three months after her death. He’s curious to know how it happened — and concerned about whether her identity has been stolen.

“I’d like to know if anyone had (gotten) a hold of her driver’s license or something,” said the retired mechanic for Houston’s Metro system. “I really don’t know who would do that.”

The couple were married 34 years. Henderson Hill confirmed that his late wife was born on the same day as the person listed by Harris County as having voted in November 2006, and her Social Security number is also the same as that found in the Social Security Administration’s death records.

The issue of dead voters on the Texas rolls has come up before.

A November 2007 state audit found records of more than 23,000 registered voters who may have died. Those cases have since been investigated, said Ann McGeehan, director of elections at the Secretary of State’s office. Records of confirmed dead voters were removed, she said.

McGeehan spoke with KPRC Channel 2’s investigative team, with whom Texas Watchdog shared its analysis. (Click screenshot at left to see KPRC Local 2’s video.)

In recent years, concerns about voter fraud have prompted a national movement to require photo identification at the polls. The U.S. Supreme Court in April upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, a decision seen as reassurance that similar laws in other states requiring voters to show photo identification, or ID without a photo, could survive legal tests.

Critics of the voter ID movement say such laws make it too difficult for people to exercise their right to vote and are especially tough on poor people, who may not already have a driver’s license or other photo ID and can’t afford the fees that come with securing identification.

In Texas, voters must identify themselves at their polling place, but they are not limited to their voter registration card or photo ID. Voters may use a driver’s license, a birth certificate, a passport, utility bill, bank statement or paycheck, among other options.

Obituaries, death records used in cleaning up rolls

Officials say they make every effort to rid the voter rolls of dead people. Workers in the Harris County tax assessor and voter registrar’s office comb through obituaries, death certificates and legal documents filed after a person’s death. They use those records, along with confirmation from family members, to identify dead people on the rolls.

“We do all we can, but you know, we’d rather err on the side of leaving people on the roll instead of taking them off inadvertently,” George Hammerlein, director of Harris County voter registration, told KPRC-Local 2 Investigates.

Hammerlein said the office has “never had any evidence” of an organized attempt to defraud the system. And given the volume of records the office deals with, Hammerlein said a few thousand is not huge.

“Four thousand out of 1.9-something-million voters represents a fairly small percent,” he said. “I think, in the grand scheme of things, it’s small.”

But Fund said it’s hard to determine whether the 4,000 is the extent of the problem. And the analysis did not cover felons, people who’ve moved out of state and duplicate records within the voter rolls.

“Let’s say somebody is registered who doesn’t exist. How would you know that that was an improper vote?” Fund said. “All you have is an address. The person shows up at the polls, signs a signature, can vote. How would you know an improper vote has been cast? You wouldn’t.”

In addition to the local efforts, the Secretary of State’s office compares voter rolls with the Department of State Health Services’ records of deaths. When the death records and voter rolls match on name, date of birth and Social Security number, the office asks local officials to remove those people from the voter rolls. And if the office finds close matches — for example, cases in which everything matches but Social Security number — the state asks local officials to investigate further.

The state’s death records are updated anywhere from 24 hours to two months after a person’s death, depending on whether electronic or paper records are used, Department of State Health Services spokesman Doug McBride said.

Candidate who lost says other voting problems loom larger

Not everyone thinks having dead voters on the rolls poses a major problem.

“Any voting irregularity is a cause for concern,” said Lloyd Wayne Oliver, who lost the Democratic contest for 174th District judge in March. “Probably some people who voted for me were dead.”

But the Houston criminal defense lawyer said other barriers to access, like political activists who purport to register everyone but trash registrations from those whose party philosophy doesn’t match theirs, weigh heavier on the system.

Oliver said he doesn’t think having dead voters on the rolls harmed his chances. Oliver lost to Ruben Guerrero, who faces Assistant District Attorney Bill Moore, a Republican, in November.

But Alexis Guidry thinks her mother would be troubled if she knew about her apparently posthumous vote.

Gloria Guidry passed away last May, but Harris County voting records indicate she cast a ballot in the March 2008 Democratic primary.

Guidry was a mother of four, grandmother of 11, and first lady, or pastor’s wife, of the New Covenant Fellowship Church in Houston.

“She would be livid,” daughter Alexis Guidry said.

Alexis Guidry, an English student at the University of Houston, said she would ask her father to look into the matter. Guidry said she didn’t know of anyone who would have access to her mother’s identifying information, and none of the four daughters share her mother’s name.

(Pictured at left: Gloria Guidry.)

Record errors, people with similar names

Some of the more than 4,000 people may not be dead.

In the method Texas Watchdog used, matching first, last and middle names and dates of birth, two people with a common name born on the same day could be mixed up with each other.

Errors in the federal death records may point to dead people when they are, in fact, alive. The Social Security Administration itself says there may be errors in its death records.

In one case identified by Texas Watchdog, a poll worker’s mistake may have led to a faulty record.

John Medford said there must have been a mix-up when he was told his father -– who died in 2006 –- had voted in the March Democratic primary.

They lived at the same Neff Street address. They shared their name: John Curtis Medford. But the father was born in 1917, the son in 1951.

“My mom and I voted. That’s all I know,” Medford said. But the younger Medford didn’t vote, records show.

Poll workers apparently recorded the father as showing up to the polls, not the son.

How we reported the story:

Deaths are recorded by the federal government at the Social Security Administration. We obtained the database through the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a program of the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The database does not include people who die without ever having a Social Security number.

We compared the federal records (1937 through June of this year) to Harris County’s records of registered voters as of Sept. 1 (kept by the county tax assessor). At that point there were almost 1.9 million voters on the rolls, though more have registered since then.

We looked for people whose names — first, last and middle — and dates of birth matched. There were more than 2,100 cases where all fields matched exactly.

Then we added close matches.

In the case of middle names, an initial like ‘J’ in one database could match a middle name like ‘John’ in the other. We found about 700 records that were like this.

We considered a blank middle name in one database as a possible match with a completed middle name in the other. And we considered blank middle names in both databases with matches on everything else possible matches. There were more than 1,400 records that fell into these categories.

We also considered possible misspellings or typos, like a middle name of ‘John’ in one database and middle name of ‘Jhon’ in the other. There were more than 100 records like this.

Our search yielded more than 4,000 matches, or voters who may be dead. Click here to see the database.

We matched those records with voting history records (kept by the Harris County clerk) to determine whether people’s names may have been used to cast ballots. We matched the 4,000 with the voting history records using identification numbers assigned by local and state officials. We examined elections since the March 2004 primary.

E-mail Lee Ann O’Neal at leeann@texaswatchdog.org or call 713-366-7979. Texas Watchdog staffers Jennifer Peebles and Trent Seibert contributed to this report.

Photo at top left: Texas Watchdog photo illustration using photos by flickr users infomatique and yaquina, used via the Creative Commons license.

Check out Texas Watchdog on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Database of Harris County voters who may be deceased

Texas Watchdog’s analysis found more than 4,000 matches between registered Harris County voters and Texans whose personal information appears in Social Security Administration death records, using the analysis method described above. Texas Watchdog is withholding these voters’ Social Security numbers and publishing only their years of birth — not their full dates of birth — to prevent fraudulent use of their identities.

From the Florida Sun Sentinel:

Many convicted felons remain on voter rolls, according to Sun Sentinel investigation

Thousands who should be ineligible are registered to vote

Reported by Peter Franceschina, Sally Kestin, John Maines, Megan O’Matz and Dana Williams Written by Sally Kestin

October 12, 2008

More than 30,000 Florida felons who by law should have been stripped of their right to vote remain registered to cast ballots in this presidential battleground state, a Sun Sentinel investigation has found.

Many are faithful voters, with at least 4,900 turning out in past elections.

Another 5,600 are not likely to vote Nov. 4 — they’re still in prison.

Of the felons who registered with a party, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.

Florida’s elections chief, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, acknowledged his staff has failed to remove thousands of ineligible felons because of a shortage of workers and a crush of new registrations in this critical swing state.

Browning said he was not surprised by the newspaper’s findings. “I’m kind of shocked that the number is as low as it is,” he said.

Asked how many ineligible felons may be on Florida’s rolls, Browning said, “We don’t know.”

The Division of Elections has a backlog of more than 108,000 possible felons who have registered to vote since January 2006 that it hasn’t had the time or staff to verify. Browning estimated that about 10 percent, once checked, would be ineligible.

“This is part of a big mess,” said Jeff Manza, professor of sociology at New York University and author of a book on felon voting. “It’s almost certain there will be challenges if the election is close enough that things hinge on this. Both parties are armed to the teeth with legal talent in all the battleground states.”

Florida’s felon ban originated before the Civil War, and today the state remains one of 10 that restrict some felons from voting even after they’ve served their time. The law requires state and county elections officials to remove felons from voter rolls after conviction and add them only when they’ve won clemency to restore their voting rights.

In 2007, the state eased the restrictions by granting automatic clemency to most nonviolent offenders who have completed their sentences. Others, including people convicted of federal offenses, multiple felonies or crimes such as drug trafficking, murder and sex charges, must still apply for clemency and have their cases reviewed.

The felons the Sun Sentinel identified never received clemency, but their names remain on Florida’s voter rolls. Some are well-known: ex-Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne and ex-Palm Beach County Commissioner Tony Masilotti, for instance, both convicted last year of public corruption.

Browning said the state painstakingly checks all voters before removing them to avoid inadvertently taking off eligible voters as happened in two previous large-scale purge attempts.

“The policy of this department, this state, is that we will err on the side of the voter,” he said.

Florida registers voters largely on an honor system, asking applicants to affirm on a signed form that they are not convicted felons or that their rights have been restored. State law requires the Elections Division to conduct criminal records checks only after voters are added to the rolls, and it takes months or even years to remove those who are ineligible, the Sun Sentinel found.

“It’s scandalous, really,” said Lance deHaven-Smith, professor of public policy at Florida State University. “Why do they have to cull the rolls after they get registered? They shouldn’t get on the rolls in the first place.”

Felons confused

Several felon voters interviewed by the Sun Sentinel expressed confusion over automatic clemency and said they thought their voting rights had been restored. Some said they merely signed registration forms that were filled out by volunteers.

“If I wasn’t able to vote, they wouldn’t have given me my [voter registration] card,” said John A. Henderson, 55, a Hallandale Beach Democrat. “I voted the last time and the times before that.”

Henderson served about a year in prison in the late 1990s for battery and trafficking in cocaine. He said he was unaware he needed to formally apply to restore his rights when he successfully registered to vote in 2002. Henderson has since cast ballots in at least six elections and received three updated voter ID cards from the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office, records show.

Broward elections officials were unaware of Henderson’s criminal record and did not check it when he registered, said county elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney. Nonetheless, she said he will remain on the rolls “until we are directed otherwise to remove him.”

Maintaining accurate voting rolls is up to the state Division of Elections, which has failed to effectively remove felons for years.

Most recently, in 2006, the Auditor General recommended the division conduct a “comprehensive check” of all registered voters against lists of convicted felons, a step the state still has not taken, Browning acknowledged.

In response to auditors, the division said running the search “would not be a problem,” but it lacked the manpower to verify possible matches. “Staff further stated that they were busy full-time” checking newly registered felons.

Once voters are added to the rolls, the state’s procedure for removing them is tedious and labor-intensive. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement runs daily checks of criminal records against new voters and those who have made changes to their registrations, sending possible matches to the Elections Division.

Elections staff then manually check each one, a process that involves three to five workers reviewing records, comparing driver’s license and prison photos and verifying convictions. Confirmed matches are sent to the counties for removal.

Since January 2006, more than 1.6 million new voters have registered in Florida. FDLE identified more than 124,000 possible felons.

In that time, elections workers removed about 7,200 from voter rolls statewide. Broward County took off just 232 and Palm Beach County 31.

“We do want to make sure … that we have the right voter,” Browning said.

Elections workers are now reviewing more than 3,800 possible felon voters but have more than 108,000 others still to be checked. “We’ve not touched those records yet,” Browning said.

Asked how long it will take to review them all, he said, “I don’t have a clue. I really don’t.”

Recently registered

John Teate, who lives west of Boca Raton, remains on the voter rolls after registering as a Democrat in July despite felony drug and theft convictions dating to the early 1990s. He said someone he thinks was a Democratic supporter signed him up while he waited for a bus at the central terminal in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

“I said, ‘I’m a convicted felon. I can’t vote,’” recalled Teate, 45. “I figured when the paperwork came in, there would be a red flag.”

A spokesman for Barack Obama’s campaign said it is unlikely his volunteers signed up Teate because his name is not in a database of new voters they registered.

Teate hasn’t voted and said he doesn’t plan to.

It’s a third-degree felony for ineligible voters to knowingly cast ballots and for campaign workers and voters to submit false registration forms. Prosecutors and elections officials in South Florida could not recall any prosecutions related to felons registering or voting in recent years.

Henderson, the Hallandale Beach voter, said he does not think his criminal record should keep him from voting.

“I paid my debt,” Henderson said. “Just because I was incarcerated, that means I’m nothing now? I’m still a father. I got two kids I’m raising.”

Evan Snow, a West Palm Beach Republican, agrees. Convicted of burglary, battery and other crimes dating to the 1980s, Snow said he sought clemency several years ago but was discouraged by the lengthy process and gave up.

Snow, 46, registered to vote in June. He said he plans to cast a ballot Nov. 4 but hasn’t decided which presidential candidate to support.

“Everybody is getting interested in politics right now,” he said. “We are all here together. Shouldn’t we all be able to make a decision about who runs the place?”

To civil rights advocates, the troubled system is an argument to change the state’s constitution to automatically restore voting rights to all felons who complete their sentences.

As of mid-September, about 118,000 mostly nonviolent offenders had received automatic clemency under the 2007 change. For more than 9,700 of them, it didn’t matter — their names had never been removed from the voter rolls.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Obama and Acorn
Community organizers, phony voters, and your tax dollars.

At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America’s Founders had been “community organizers” — like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren’t like that any more. Mr. Obama’s kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country.

Acorn — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We’ve written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain’s campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn’s ties to Mr. Obama. It’s about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for “a living wage,” for “affordable housing,” for “tax justice” and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting “strikes” against banks so they’d lower credit standards.

But the organization’s real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an “affordable housing” provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.

All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.

The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted “a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications.” Earlier this month, Nevada’s Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn’s offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada’s Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly.

Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida’s Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, “making people up or registering people that were still in prison.”

Then there’s Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. “All the signatures looked exactly the same,” said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn’s registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.

That’s just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book.

Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago “community organizer” at Acorn’s side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn’s leaders for being “smack dab in the middle” of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.

During his tenure on the board of Chicago’s Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for “staging, sound, lighting.” It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it’s disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you’re shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he’s on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.

The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law — on the taxpayer’s dime.

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Multiple registrants tell Cuyahoga County Elections Board ACORN workers begged for signatures

Teenager Freddie Johnson said he was offered smokes and
dollar bills to fill out voter registration cards.

And now the Cuyahoga County Elections Board has 73 cards
with Johnson’s name on them.

Johnson and another prolific registrant were subpoenaed to
testify at a meeting Monday as the Elections Board continued
its look at possible fraud by ACORN, a national organization
that tries to get low- and moderate-income people to
register. ACORN’s methods have drawn interest in a
number of states this presidential election year.

Johnson, 19, said he mostly was trying to help ACORN
workers who begged him to sign up because they needed to
keep their jobs.

“They’d come up with a sob story why they needed
the signature,” said Johnson, of Garfield Heights.

ACORN leaders have acknowledged that workers paid by the
hour were given quotas to fill.

Board member Sandy McNair said ACORN did not do a competent
job carrying out its business plan. Members, in fact, said
little about ACORN. And they turned their investigation over
to the county sheriff and prosecutor.

A second person to testify, Christopher Barkley, 33, said
ACORN workers pestered him while they tried to gather
signatures.

Barkley, of Cleveland, said he was homeless and reading a
book on Public Square when he signed some of the 13 cards
that contain his name. He filled out cards – with his
mother’s house or workplace as the address – to help
workers stay employed.

“Me being a kind-hearted person, I said
‘Yeah,’ ” Barkley recalled.

After the testimony, board Chairman Jeff Hastings paged
through a binder that contained copies of cards with
Barkley’s name on them, and said, “This is
ridiculous.”

Sheriff’s deputies interviewed both men separately
after their testimony. They were released and not charged.
Chief Deputy Doug Burkhart said they are possible witnesses.

The board decided that Johnson and Barkley must cast
provisional ballots if they vote in the presidential
election. Provisional ballots are not counted until after
the election and only after a voter’s address is
verified.

Two other people were subpoenaed for Monday but could not
be found. The board canceled both of their registrations and
forced another woman involved in the investigation to vote
provisionally in the Nov. 4 election.

One of the no-shows has already tried to vote, the board
was told. His registration already had been canceled, yet he
tried to register and vote on the same day about two weeks
ago. Board workers recognized his name and stopped him.

Katy Gall, ACORN’s Ohio director, said outside the
meeting that she’s proud of the work her group did.
Gall said some of the 13,000 canvassers nationwide obviously
didn’t live up to the organization’s standards.
She said ACORN will continue to help with the county’s
investigation and try to refine its programs.

The Cuyahoga board identified up to 60 people whose names
appeared on suspicious ACORN-submitted cards.

Elections Director Jane Platten said the board has
safeguards to catch fraudulent cards and stressed that voter
registration fraud is not the same as voter fraud.

Ohio law says a person must cast a provisional ballot if an
address cannot be verified. The board checks addresses by
sending out mail that is not to be forwarded. Poll books are
marked to tell workers who must cast provisional ballots.

Board member Rob Frost, also the county GOP chairman, said
he is not convinced Barkley and Johnson would have tried to
vote more than once. He said it’s clear ACORN workers
disregarded registration laws.

“I wouldn’t want there to be widespread fear that
what ACORN has caused will lead to widespread [voter]
fraud,” Frost said after the meeting.

Board workers said ACORN had turned in nearly 72,000 cards
since January. Of those, more than 5,000 were missing
information and so could not be used. The board could not
verify the address on 3,500 others. Those people will have
to vote provisionally if they turn out at the polls.

From the New York Post:

BOGUS VOTER BOOTED AMID PROBE OF ACORN

4,000 OF LEFT-WING GROUP'S SIGN-UPS ARE SHADY

By JEANE MacINTOSH in Cleveland and MAGGIE HABERMAN in New York

Last updated: 10:11 am
October 14, 2008
Posted: 3:44 am
October 14, 2008

Investigators probing ACORN have learned that an Ohio man registered to vote several times and cast a bogus ballot with a fake address, officials said yesterday, as they revealed that nearly 4,000 registration applications supplied by the left-leaning activist group were suspect.

The vote of Darnell Nash, one of four people subpoenaed in a Cuyahoga County probe of ACORN's voter-registration activities, was canceled and his case was turned over to local prosecutors and law enforcement, Board of Elections officials said yesterday.

Nash had registered to vote repeatedly from an address that belonged to a legitimately registered voter, officials said during a hearing at which the subpoenaed voters were to testify.

Board officials had contacted Nash this summer, questioned his address and told him to stop repeat registering.

But still, he breezed into Ohio election offices – the state allows early voting for president – reregistered with a fake address and cast a paper ballot, officials said.

"He came in on 9/30 and Mr. Nash again registered to vote at [someone else's] address, and he cast a ballot," said board official Jane Platten.

Nash did not turn up for the hearing.

The Post reported last week on the Cleveland-area probe and the subpoenas, which were sent out to four people – including two voters who said they were hounded by ACORN workers to register over and over, even when they warned they'd already done so.

It's the latest issue in the probe of ACORN's registering voters in Ohio, one of at least nine states where officials are investigating similar reports of phony sign-ups by the group.

At the same time, officials said, some 5 percent, or 3,650, of the 73,000 total registration cards turned in by ACORN in the Cleveland area from its Project Vote initiative to sign up low-income voters were "questionable," Platten said.

There were "egregious acts of registering multiple times," said Platten. "The extent of it is beyond the resources of this board."

Nash's case and three others were turned over to authorities yesterday, said Ryan Miday, a spokesman for prosecutor Bill Masson.

"We will consider presenting it to a grand jury," Miday said.

A member of the board said if necessary, the FBI or federal prosecutors could be brought in for assistance.

Still, members of the bipartisan board downplayed any voter fraud.

And Platten insisted officials with ACORN have offered "any and all" help in probing the questionable activities. Katy Gall, the Ohio state director for ACORN, said her group is cooperating fully with the investigation.

She added that her group has fired anyone who was found soliciting duplicate registrations.

ACORN, whose political arm has endorsed Democratic nominee Barack Obama, has signed up more than 1.3 million voters for this cycle.

ACORN adviser Scott Levenson said, "If one of the 13,000 [people] we hired is potentially a bad apple in the bunch, we encourage the authorities to prosecute, as appropriate, anyone that did the wrong thing. We discipline [and] we fire workers who [abuse their position] . . . We encourage prosecutors to follow suit."

He also denied suggestions that the group pays canvassers by the number of names they sign up, and that they have quotas.

Also yesterday:

* Two of the four subpoenaed voters, Freddie Johnson and Christopher Barkley, met privately with sheriff's deputies and described what they'd told The Post about being hounded by ACORN workers. Barkley testified at the hearing that some of the registration cards listing his name weren't filled out by him.

* In an e-mail to supporters, John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, slammed "the left-wing activist group ACORN" and suggested, "We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election."

From the St. Petersburg Times:

Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer, but Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which had an ACORN stamp on it.

Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer.

Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which was stamped with the logo of the nonprofit group ACORN.

Tow truck driver Newton Bell did register to vote in Orange County this summer. In the hands of ACORN, his paperwork went through without a hitch.

Two cases, two outcomes, each with a connection to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Nationwide, ACORN is a favorite GOP target for allegations of voter registration fraud this year.

That’s not new. Similar complaints followed the 2004 elections. A criminal investigation in Florida found no evidence of fraud. ACORN even has a cameo role in the scandal over the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Department.

Under attack again, ACORN leaders defend their work. Often, they say, things are as not simple as they’re portrayed.

Take Mickey Mouse.

Yes, that’s their logo. But they say their workers routinely scanned all suspicious applications.

“We don’t think this card came through our system,” said Brian Kettenring, ACORN’s head organizer in Florida.

With more than 450,000 member families nationwide — 14,000 in Florida — ACORN is a grass roots advocacy group focused on health care, wages, affordable housing and foreclosure.

Bell, the truck driver, certainly, is more representative of ACORN’s work in Florida than the cartoon mouse is.

This year, ACORN signed up 1.3-million voters nationwide and about 152,000 in Florida, mostly in Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ACORN estimates it flagged 2 percent of its Florida registrations as problematic because they were incomplete, duplicates or just plain bogus.

That’s enough to give headaches to election officials and to provide ammunition to Republican activists.

Brevard County elections officials have turned over 23 suspect registrations from ACORN to prosecutors. The state Division of Elections has received two ACORN-related complaints, in Orange and Broward counties.

ACORN wasn’t active in the Tampa Bay area. Last week, however, Pinellas County elections officials gave local prosecutors 35 questionable registrations from another group, Work for Progress.

The GOP accuses ACORN of registration fraud all over the country. In Las Vegas, authorities said the group’s petitions included the names of the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

“This is part of a widespread and systemic effort … to undermine the election process,” says Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross, who describes ACORN as a “quasicriminal organization.”

No, Kettenring said, it’s more like Wal-Mart.

“Some percentage of Wal-Mart workers try to get paid without doing their work or steal from their employer,” he said.

Some ACORN workers, he said, have simply made up names.

Maybe, elections officials say, but it’s still annoying.

“We did experience a significant amount of problems, enough that we did contact the group to express some of our frustration with their work,” said Linda Tanko, Orange County’s senior deputy supervisor for voter services.

ACORN’s problems included applications with unreadable handwriting, missing information, signatures that didn’t match those on file, altered dates of birth or Social Security numbers, applications for people already registered to vote and names that appeared repeatedly, often with different addresses.

ACORN said it terminates canvassers who forge applications. In Broward County, it fired one worker after he turned in applications with similar handwriting and brought the matter to the attention of the Supervisor of Elections Office.

Pay to gather registrations started at $8 an hour, and the goal was 20 signups per day. The organization did not pay by the signature or pay bonuses for volume. The organization also tried to follow up on each registration, calling the person listed to confirm that the form is accurate.

In most states, ACORN must turn in every form that is filled out. “We must turn in every voter registration card by Florida law, even Mickey Mouse,” Kettenring said.

Well, not yet, said Jennifer Krell Davis, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State.

Florida does have a law saying third-party voter registration groups must turn in every form without regard to things like party affiliation, race, ethnicity or gender. So far, however, the state has not written the rules to implement it.

In Florida, ACORN is best known for its 2004 effort to lead a petition drive to raise the minimum wage. The FDLE looked into voter fraud allegations then and found no laws were broken.

ACORN also played a role in the firing of one of nine U.S. attorneys dismissed in 2006.

In New Mexico, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired “because of complaints by elected officials who had a political interest in the outcome” of, among other things, a Republican voter fraud complaint against ACORN, according to an internal Justice Department report last month.

This year, 39 members of the House of Representatives have asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate ACORN.

One of those, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, also has written to supervisor of elections offices in Central Florida seeking “all ACORN-related registration of voters within the last two years.”

Republicans also accuse Sen. Barack Obama of trying to distance himself from ACORN, which he represented in a federal lawsuit in 1995.

ACORN’s political action committee has endorsed Obama, but the group says its voter registration efforts are nonpartisan.

And the McCain campaign’s complaints now are puzzling, ACORN says, because two years ago McCain was the keynote speaker at an immigration reform rally ACORN co-sponsored in Miami. “In 2006,” Kettenring said, “we were working together.”

Richard Danielson can be reached at danielson@sptimes.com or (813)269-5311.

Dallas & Fort Worth Bishops Tells Catholics Voting For Pro-Choice Candidates Is “Morally Impermissible”: “

In a two-page encyclical issued last week, the Bishops of the Dallas and Forth Worth dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church decried pro-choice political candidates and told church members that voting for pro-choice candidates was ‘morally impermissible.’

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