ACORN Director Admits Exaggeration of 1.3 Million Registered, Now says 450K

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group ACORN and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote's executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

The remainder were registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 registrations that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Slater acknowledged.

In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure Thursday that 30 percent of ACORN's registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was ACORN's effort to unfairly tilt the election.

"We were wondering how many were Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse," said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. "The group is really tainted, and any work they do is suspect."

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—A woman has filed a complaint claiming her 67-year-old mother was reduced to tears by a man who told her he was a private investigator with ties to the state Republican Party and questioned her right to vote.

A national voters rights group, Project Vote, has called on U.S. Attorney Greg Fouratt to investigate the state Republican Party and its contractors for violating the Voter Rights Act by trying to intimidate minority first-time voters into not casting their ballots.

calls by state and national GOP groups to investigate ACORN, election officials in Hennepin and Ramsey counties say there is scant evidence of fraud, other than a few hundred late registration filings.

There are other kinds of problems. ACORN workers acknowledge that as many as a third or more of the registration applications they turn over to election officials are rejected for technical reasons, such as incomplete names, addresses and phone numbers. But they say that is not fraud.

Still, with 11 days to go before the election, ACORN's historic ties to Barack Obama and other Democrats have prompted GOP officials in Minnesota and elsewhere to raise questions about the group's voter registration work, questions that Democrats see as an orchestrated campaign to sling mud and suppress voter turnout.

Gov. Matt Blunt, a former secretary of state, is out today with a statement that raises lots of questions about what's going to happen on Nov. 4.

Here's the statement:

“As governor and as a former secretary of state, I am very concerned about the integrity of the upcoming election.  I became secretary of state following the voter fraud that occurred in 2000 and issued a comprehensive report entitled ‘Mandate for Reform: Election Turmoil in St. Louis November 7, 2000,’ http://governor.mo.gov/...ReformIssued7-24-01.pdf, which provided the framework for election reform in Missouri.