WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 DC-ACORN-Vegas-raid
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Oct. 7, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) interim Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis issued the following statement in response to the raid of ACORN's office in Las Vegas:
"Over the past year, ACORN has worked hard to help over 80,000 people in Clark County register to vote. As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have reviewed all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations.
For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application into election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual.
Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 "problem application packages," which involved 33 former canvassers.
On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.
Today's raid by the Secretary of State's Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls."
ACORN is the nation's largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, with over 400,000 member families across the country. Since 1970, *ACORN* has taken action and won victories on such issues as better housing, living wages for low-wage workers, more investment in our communities, and better public schools.
SOURCE Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
