ACORN and the Census

The Census Bureau documents given to Judicial Watch also indicate that in March, after the Fox News story on ACORN’s Census partnership was published, the agency was swamped with angry calls. This was its response: 

Census Bureau statement, March 2009: Any charge of claim that a Census Bureau partner could influence or have direct input into census operations is baseless and inaccurate. The sole entity that will conduct the 2010 census is the U.S. Census Bureau, along with its hundreds of thousands of dedicated workers. Further, the Census Bureau has strict quality assurance procedures in every operation to prevent the introduction of errors and/or fraudulent information into the national count.

Census Bureau public affairs specialist Shelly Lowe elaborated on the hiring process in an interview with FactCheck.org, saying that "partners help us recruit by promoting the fact that we’re hiring," but they have no say in the actual hiring. The agency will need a whopping 1.2 million temporary workers to go door-to-door, Lowe said, but it isn’t hiring everyone who walks in. "There’s a test, an FBI background check and a fingerprint check" that every applicant must go through, Lowe said. "We look for language skills, and we need people in every community."

And just as not every job applicant is hired, not every group that wants to be a partner is accepted. On page 47 of the Judicial Watch materials, an internal agency e-mail sets out some of the types of groups that would be rejected, such as hate groups and law enforcement, anti-immigrant or other groups that might cause some people to be afraid to participate.

ACORN Critics 

Why all the attention to this community organizing outfit? ACORN has been a frequent target of conservative talk show hosts, including Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, since last fall, when Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign accused the group of "massive voter fraud" and claimed that Obama had "long and deep ties" to the group. We found the voter fraud claim to be false – although some canvassers from the group had been found guilty of or investigated for voter registration fraud – and the one about Obama’s involvement to be overstated, although he has had more contact with the group than he originally let on. Nevertheless, the allegations are still floating around the blogosphere and talk shows, where ACORN is being described as a criminal enterprise that sends partisans to the polls to vote multiple times using the names of people long dead. We’ve continued to monitor the various cases against and investigations of ACORN workers, and so far there’s been no evidence that fraudulent votes were cast as a result of anything they did. ACORN describes and defends its voter registration work on its Web site.

The latest legal developments we’re aware of concerning ACORN are in Nevada and Pennsylvania. In Nevada, ACORN itself as well as the group’s former Las Vegas field director and its regional director for voter registration were charged in May with multiple counts of compensating individuals for registering voters. This appears to be the first time the organization itself has been criminally charged in connection with voter registration. The problem, according to the state attorney general, is that it’s illegal in Nevada for someone to be paid based on the number of voters he or she registers; the attorney general said that ACORN used both a quota system to keep or fire workers and a bonus system that rewarded employees further for registering more than 20 voters in a day. State officials said that the alleged practices resulted in thousands of "garbage" registrations on the voter rolls, including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

A spokesman for the group said then that the bonus system was "in violation of ACORN’s national policies" and that canvassers didn’t have to meet a strict quota. Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s CEO, said at the time that the charges were "trumped up" and "outrageous," and that she was confident the group would be acquitted.

Also in May, the district attorney of Allegheny County, Pa., charged seven ACORN workers with forgery and violating election law by filing hundreds of bogus voter registration forms last year. That investigation is continuing, the D.A. said. There have been no accusations in either Pennsylvania or Nevada that ACORN or its workers are connected with any instances of voters casting, or attempting to cast, ballots illegally.

We’ve also received some non-ACORN-related questions about the census, having to do with allegations that the White House plans to interfere with the process. When Obama nominated Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire to be secretary of commerce in February, some groups complained that he was no friend of the Census Bureau, having resisted an increase in its funding in the 1990s. Those objections prompted assurances from the administration that senior White House aides would oversee the agency. But those assurances in turn triggered Republican cries that the White House was trying to politicize the census-taking process. Gregg withdrew as a nominee, citing the census as one of his concerns, though the administration had clarified that it didn’t intend to run the headcount out of the White House. It said it would simply work with the agency’s director, a practice for which there is ample precedent. In March, White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said:

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt, March 2009: The president wants to ensure that the census conducts a fair and accurate count. … The census director will report to the Commerce secretary. Like in every census under Democratic or Republican administrations there will be interest in Congress and at the White House in this national priority.