Despite claims from the McCain and Palin campaign and Republican politicos that fraudulent registration applications can lead to massive voter fraud, a member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee said in an interview published by Politico.com that he knew of no case in which a fraudulent voter registration application had led to someone casting a fraudulent vote.

Ronald Michaelson, who was also the executive director of the Illinois Board of Elections for nearly three decades, said that trying to cast fraudulent votes by first submitting phony voter registration applications didn't make for a very sensible or plausible election-rigging scheme.

Michaelson said the rancorous debate over the issue in recent weeks has undermined voters' confidence in the election process

“The fact that so many of these illegal registrations are being made public raises a perception in the minds of people,’’ he said. “That’s more of a general concern. You don’t want to perpetuate the idea that our election process is lacking integrity.”

When asked if the Republican party didn't hold responsibility for driving that perception through remarks made by McCain and others, Michaelson said, “Well, it doesn’t help. It has captured the attention of a lot of people.”

Why perpetuate it then, Michaelson was asked.

He replied, “Maybe it’s because there’s nothing else to talk about."

Fraudulent voter registrations have been at the center of controversy after it came to light that some temporary workers registering voters on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) had submitted fake registration applications to increase their numbers and perhaps please supervisors. Some reports had claimed the workers submitted false applications to earn higher pay, but ACORN told the New York Times it paid workers an hourly wage, rather than per application.

One of the fraudulent applications was submitted in the name of Mickey Mouse, others were submitted under the name of Dallas Cowboys' quarterback Tony Romo, under the name of a deceased voter, the name of a restaurant and the names of people randomly selected from a phonebook.

FBI agents and state officials are investigating ACORN operations in several states to determine if the organization or any of its workers were involved in a coordinated scheme to submit fraudulent applications.

But ACORN has maintained that it was the first entity to bring the fraudulent applications to light and that its internal audits of applications, augmented by checks conducted by election officials, prevent such applications from making it to voter rolls.

The organization said that it's required in some states to submit every application it receives to election officials, even questionable ones, but that it flags such applications to draw officials' attention to them. It even temporarily closed an office in August in Gary, Indiana, and replaced its management staff after discovering a high number of fraudulent applications were being submitted by workers there.

But as a result of these efforts, it says it's become a target of partisan politics.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain declared during one of his debates with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama that ACORN was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

He also accused Obama of ties to the organization. Both claims have been analyzed by FactCheck.org.

ACORN organizers have since received death threats, and ACORN offices have been vandalized and burgled.

Republicans have been the target of their own voter registration fraud scandals recently.

A firm called Young Political Majors, which was hired by the California Republican Party to register voters, is being investigated for improperly registering voters as Republicans by leading them to believe they were signing petitions calling for harsher treatment of child molesters. The firm received $7 to $12 for every person it registered as a Republican.

The owner of the firm, Mark Jacoby, was also arrested this month on felony charges of voter registration fraud and perjury after officials say they discovered that he had fraudulently registered himself at a California address where he didn't live in order to qualify to register other California voters.

The California Republican Party reportedly also paid $175,000 for voter registration efforts to a Republican operative who had been investigated for voter registration fraud in several states.

Democrats have accused McCain and the GOP of attacking ACORN to draw attention away from voter suppression efforts occurring in several states, such as deceptive robocalls designed to trick voters into not going to the polls and efforts by Republican election officials and party officials topurge eligible voters from registration lists in some states and challenge the eligibility of voters in other states.

Democratic officials say the likelihood that a fraudulent registration application would lead to a fraudulent vote is small.

When Republican officials were asked for examples of such fraudulent votes being cast, Politico reported that a spokesman for the McCain campaign pointed to 13 news stories and a 2003 Missouri state auditor’s report. But eleven of the examples he cited didn't involve registration fraud, and two of them concerned convicted felons who were accused of casting illegal votes in their own names.

There was only one example of a forged registration being connected to a fraudulent vote. It involved a 2006 story about a community organizer who registered a non U.S. citizen, after which someone voted in the noncitizen’s name.

A reader has pointed out a second Politico story, however, that lists a number of other cases in several states in which false voter registrations led to fraudulent votes. The piece also quotes former ACORN workers who say the organization had no quality control and even alleged that some ACORN affiliates purposely flooded election officials with false applications to create confusion that would lead to some applicants getting on the voter roll. Here are a couple of salient paragraphs from the piece.

Anita MonCrief, an ACORN whistle-blower who worked for both it and its Project Vote registration affiliate from 2005 until early this year, agrees. "It's ludicrous to say that fake registrations can't become fraudulent votes," she told me. "I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots." MonCrief, a 29-year old University of Alabama graduate who wanted to become part of the civil rights movement, worked as a strategic consultant for ACORN as well as a development associate with Project Vote and sat in on meetings with the national staffs of both groups. She has given me documents that back up many of her statements, including one that indicates that the goal of ACORN's New Mexico affiliate was that only 40 percent of its submitted registrations had to be valid. MonCrief also told me that some ACORN affiliates had a conscious strategy of flooding voter registration offices with suspect last-minute forms in part to create confusion and chaos that would make it more likely suspect voters would be allowed to cast ballots by overworked officials. Nate Toller, who worked on ACORN registration drives and headed an ACORN campaign against Wal-Mart in California until 2006, agrees. "There's no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances," he told me.

ACORN conducted extensive voter registration drives in 18 states and has claimed that it registered 1.3 million new voters during this election cycle, most of them minority or poor, working-class voters and young voters – categories of voters who tend to register and vote Democrat. The New York Times recently reported, however, that this number was wildly inflated and that the real number was closer to 450,000.

Some 400,000 applications submitted by ACORN to election offices were rejected because they were incomplete, were duplicate registrations or were found to be fraudulent applications. About 9,000, or about 2 percent of the rejected applications, were found to be fraudulent. A lawyer for ACORN, however, estimated that 5,000 to 6,000 additional applications could prove to be fraudulent as investigations continue.

The remaining applications were re-registrations from people who had moved and were simply registering their change of address.

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