Election fraud is suspected

Saturday, August 12, 2006 Summit and Cuyahoga counties also are investigating potential fraud. COLUMBUS (AP) — Franklin County's elections director said he has turned over 500 potentially fraudulent voter registration cards to the county prosecutor for possible criminal charges. Elections officials in two other Ohio counties also have reported problems with cards that could be bogus. Franklin County elections workers discovered cards with signatures in the same handwriting, addresses for vacant lots and incorrect information about people already registered to vote, Director Matt Damschroder said Thursday. One card had the name of a dead man. The cards forwarded to Prosecutor Ron O'Brien were collected between March and July by workers for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, Damschroder said. ACORN has fired a number of workers and is cooperating with the probe, organizer Katy Gall said. Bryan Williams, the elections director in Summit County, has said he will seek an investigation of about a dozen potentially bogus registration cards. Elections workers who noticed inconsistencies such as sloppy writing called those named on the cards, but they said they had not signed them, he said. In Cuyahoga County, elections workers are reviewing a group of cards that appear to duplicate those already on file except for one detail such as a birth date or Social Security number. Targeting the problem Damschroder said ACORN has met weekly with the Franklin County board since March to work to avoid registration form fraud. In 2004, an ACORN worker was indicted by a county grand jury on a charges of false election registration and submitting false election signatures. "From my perspective, both ACORN and the public are being defrauded by these apparently illegal voter registration forms," Damschroder said. The group, which has collected about 12,000 cards in Franklin County, has eight circulators in Columbus who earn between $8 and $11 an hour. Gall said workers are not paid per signature. "We are interested in seeing people who are gaming the system prosecuted," she said. Gall said a new law makes it harder for voter registration groups to detect fraud because it requires the individuals collecting the cards to turn them in.