ACORN Vegas Office Raided in Voter Fraud Investigation

ACORN's Las Vegas headquarters has been raided by Nevada authorities looking for evidence of voter fraud.



Nevada state authorities seized records and computers Tuesday from the Las Vegas office of an organization that tries to get low-income people registered to vote, after fielding complaints of voter fraud.

Bob Walsh, spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state's office, told FOXNews.com the raid was prompted by ongoing complaints about "erroneous" registration information being submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN. The group was submitting the information through a voter sign-up drive known as Project Vote.

"Some of them used non-existent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were duplicates of previously filed applications," Walsh said, describing the complaints, which largely came from the registrar in Clark County, Nev. He said some registrations used the names of Dallas Cowboys football players.

Walsh said agents from both the secretary of state's office and Nevada attorney general's office conducted the raid, and "took a bunch of stuff."

ACORN spokesman Charles Jackson confirmed the group's Nevada office was raided.

It's not the first time ACORN's been under investigation for irregularities in registration records.

In 2006, ACORN committed what the Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed called the "worse case of election fraud" in the state's history.

In the case, ACORN submitted just over 1,800 new voter registration forms, but there was a problem. The names were made up -- all but six of the 1,800 submissions were fakes.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Who Is ACORN
Going back over the years

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has announced a statewide investigation into widespread fraudulent
voter registrations, many of which have been tied back to the leading
organizer of Florida's Amendment 5 ballot initiative to raise the minimum
wage. But this is just the tip of an iceberg of illegalities, fraud and
contradictions connected to the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now (ACORN). In recent days, ACORN has been at the epicenter of
reports of potentially fraudulent voter registrations across the nation --
including many by ex-felons -- submitted by ACORN employees in the
presidential swing states of Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, Pennsylvania, New
Mexico and Minnesota.
The Employment Policies Institute has updated and re-released its report,
"The Real ACORN: Anti-Employee, Anti-Union, Big Business" with the latest
details on ACORN's involvement in what appears to be widespread voter
registration fraud. The report includes statements from former ACORN
employees on the illegal nature of the organization's promotion of the ballot
initiative to raise Florida's minimum wage to $6.15 per hour.
"This report reveals ACORN's pattern and practice of deception and fraud,"
said EPI research director Craig Garthwaite. "The latest allegations of
widespread voter registration fraud should prove to be the last of ACORN's
nine political lives."
Former ACORN Miami-Dade field director Mac Stuart has filed a lawsuit
against ACORN and has made charges of rampant voter fraud operations. Stuart
was employed and specifically tasked by ACORN to generate 103,000 new voter
registrations from Dade County. He reports that ACORN threw out Republican
registrations while paying gatherers for Democratic ones, both actions illegal
in Florida. Stuart also charges that ACORN targeted ex-cons and that he
personally set up registration tables outside the Miami police department and
Dade County jail. He went on to state, "The voter registration project has
been operating illegally since it started."
ACORN has paid workers for every voter registration card collected -- a
felony in Florida and also illegal in Missouri and Pennsylvania. ACORN also
routinely accepted signatures for Amendment 5 from individuals who were not
currently registered to vote -- a requirement under Florida law.
Voter registration and petition fraud is just the latest chapter in
ACORN's long sordid history. The EPI report also reveals:

ACORN Involved in Union Embezzlement -- In the late 1990s, ACORN's Project
Vote was involved in an $850,000 embezzling scheme, where union funds and
kickbacks were used to illegally aid the 1996 re-election bid of then-
Teamsters President Ron Carey. A New York federal jury found the Teamsters
political director guilty of the conspiracy.

ACORN bilks AmeriCorps -- In 1996, the Inspector General of the AmeriCorps
program stripped a $1 million grant from the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC).
When applying, AHC had denied any connections to ACORN, since the grant was
not intended for political advocacy organizations. Evidence later uncovered
by the Inspector General found that not only was AHC created by ACORN, engaged
in numerous transactions with one another, and sharing staff and office space
-- but it utilized the AmeriCorps grant to increase ACORN membership, a
violation of federal guidelines.

ACORN Union-Busts Own Workers -- On March 27, 2003 the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) found that ACORN had violated the National Labor
Relations Act and was required to rehire and pay restitution to employees
terminated for attempting to form a union. The NLRB ruling is just the latest
in a trend of ACORN's union-busting tactics. ACORN employees have
historically demanded higher wages, safer working conditions and more timely
contracted wages. These efforts have been repressed behind closed doors by
the hypocritical ACORN leadership, which publicly advocates higher pay and
better working conditions for private sector workers.

ACORN and Minimum Wage Hypocrisy -- Most egregiously, ACORN promotes
ballot initiatives and local ordinances to force businesses to pay higher
minimum wages, as they are currently doing with the minimum wage proposal in
Amendment 5. In 1995, however, ACORN sued the state of California to have its
employees exempted from the state minimum wage. ACORN argued that being forced
to pay higher wages would mean that they would hire fewer employees -- the
very dilemma faced by businesses. Incredibly, ACORN stated that paying its
employees a lower wage would allow them to be more sympathetic to the low- and
moderate-income families they were attempting to help. ACORN argued that
abiding by the state minimum wage would limit their ability to promote their
agenda and would therefore be a violation of their First Amendment rights.
The trial court judge dismissed ACORN's suits, stating, "leaving aside the
latter argument's absurdity ... we find ACORN to be laboring under a
fundamental misconception of constitutional law."

The Associated Press/prnewswire.com/Foxnews/True facts News by Anthony Landaeta contributed to this report.