photo: "Radical Obama: the Middle Years" at the Plumb Bob Blog
HARRISBURG - A former employee of an affiliate of ACORN testified yesterday that the community group now in the national spotlight knew that most new voter registration forms it had gathered were fraudulent.
"Forty percent was OK," said Anita Moncrief, referring to the number of bona fide registrations that officials at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now believed was acceptable.Moncrief was the star witness yesterday in a Commonwealth Court case brought by the state Republican Party and others who are asking a judge to step in and prevent voter fraud on Election Day.
For nearly two hours, Moncrief, 29, gave a scathing, though at times vague, assessment of ACORN and its efforts to go into battleground states and help mostly minorities and the poor register to vote for the first time.
The group, she said, barely trained its workers in how to register voters properly, and would fire employees if they did not meet a quota of 20 new voter applicants daily. And, if they were caught committing fraud, the group "threw them under the bus" as scapegoats to take all the legal blame, Moncrief said.
Moncrief said she worked as a development associate for Project Vote in Washington from 2005 until early this year, but that the group was so closely aligned with its sister organization, ACORN, that they were one and the same.
Moncrief was fired in January after using a Project Vote credit card to pay for personal items. On the stand, she acknowledged the incident and called it "a bad mistake." She is unemployed after short stints in two jobs since she was fired.
Nationwide, ACORN has helped 1.3 million people register to vote this election cycle. That includes about 140,000 new registrants in Pennsylvania.
Many of them have been flagged by election officials across the state as illegitimate because they were already registered, gave wrong names, or provided incorrect addresses.
Plaintiffs are asking the court to, among other things, prohibit ACORN and its affiliates from further contacting those that the groups signed up in Pennsylvania as well as to force the groups to fund public-service announcements to inform new voters that they need to bring identification to the polling place.
The suit also asks the court to order ACORN and affiliates including Project Vote to release a list of all voters registered in the latest drive.
Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson, after hearing seven hours of testimony yesterday, said he hopes to rule on the matter today..
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