PITTSBURGH—The district attorney for the Pittsburgh area is investigating voter registration forms turned in by a group under scrutiny nationally for registration irregularities.
The Allegheny County district attorney's investigation focuses on less than 100 registration forms that appear to be forged or otherwise illegitimate: such as those duplicating the name of someone already registered under another party.
DA's spokesman Mike Manko says if charges are filed it won't affect the integrity of the Nov. 4 elections because there are polling place safeguards to make sure only legally registered voters cast a ballot.
Officials with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, say any problems are being caused by lazy workers.
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WASHINGTON, Oct 10, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ — The following is an excerpt from CNN's "ElectionCenter," and is being released today by the Republican National Committee:
CAMPBELL BROWN: Now, it is officially nonpartisan. But this group works hard to register low-income voters who tend to vote for Democrats. ACORN's under fire over allegedly phony voter registration in several states, and Drew Griffin of CNN's Special Investigations Unit is digging into this for us. You'll be pretty surprised by what he found.
DREW GRIFFIN: There are 5,000 of them.
RUTHANN HOAGLAND: These?
GRIFFIN: These.
HOAGLAND: These.
GRIFFIN: Those?
HOAGLAND: And these.
GRIFFIN: They are new voter registration applications turned into by the community organizing group, ACORN, which has launched a massive voter registration drive, and with 5,000 applications in this one county dumped on just before the October 6 deadline; it looked like to Elections Board Administrator Ruth Ann Hoagland like ACORN was extremely successful, until her workers began finding problems.
GRIFFIN: A lot of them?
HOAGLAND: 50 percent. We had close to 5,000 total from ACORN, and so far we have identified about 2,100.
GRIFFIN: So roughly half of them are bad.
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