ACORN Responds To Voter Registration Lawsuit

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

And now, as I mentioned that Mr. Hansen did not wish to be in the same conversation and dialog with the ACORN spokesperson, so we're going to hear from them now. We're hearing from Austin King. Welcome, thank you for joining us.

Mr. AUSTIN KING (National Director of ACORN Financial Justice Center): Good morning.

MARTIN: Now, as you just heard Mr. Hansen say, their argument is that ACORN isn't playing by the rules, that there's a pattern of seeing the rules not followed, of multiple registrations to the same address. What's your response to that?

Mr. KING: Well, let's talk about some of the systems that we have in place - the rules, so to speak. ACORN requires every canvasser that we hire to sign an affidavit that they will not engage in this kind of fraudulent voter registration and if we ever suspect anyone of doing so, we fire them immediately and turn them over to officials.

MARTIN: To be...

Mr. KING: We also call every card that we collect three times to make sure that it's a verified voter and under state law that we're required - that when we find a bad card, a Mickey Mouse card or a Jimmy John's card as the media have been so fond of sensationalizing...

MARTIN: And what you're talking about is registration signed with Mickey Mouse or Jimmy John, something like that.

Mr. KING: Precisely.

MARTIN: That's what you're talking about.

Mr. KING: We still have to turn those cards into election officials but we do so under a separate cover sheet, clearly identifying them as cards that we believe are problematic and not real voters.

MARTIN: So your point is that you are the ones bringing these difficult or these problematic registrations to the attention of authorities.

Mr. KING: That's precisely true.

MARTIN: That you're the one who's doing that. But to be clear that these kinds of allegations are nothing new for ACORN. You traditionally hire young people, perhaps inexperienced people, low-income people to get people registered. You pay them according to the number of people they register, so is it possible that there's an incentive?

Mr. KING: No. Excuse me. We do actually pay the hour.

MARTIN: To register people. Mm hmm.

Mr. KING: We pay by the hour, unlike the GOP operation in California that was recently - actually their head was arrested for voter registration fraud just over the weekend. They paid by the cart, seven to $12 a cart. We pay by the hour. So there's no financial incentive to do fraud and we actually fire anyone that does fraud, so there's a very clear incentive to not do that kind of fraud. But unfortunately, when you have 13,000 employees across the country that help to collect those record of 1.3 million new voter registration cards, some of them did choose unfortunately to not do the hard work of finding unregistered voters and instead filled out some fake names. And when we caught them we turned them over to authorities and fired them immediately.

We fully cooperated with any investigations into ACORN and will continue to do so because we are following the rules, we're doing a great job of it. Our quality control measures are helping catch this fraud and root it out and - but as you mentioned earlier, this is really a fraud against ACORN. When employees are trying to take a paycheck without doing the work that we pay them to do.

MARTIN: Well, to what do you account for these ongoing problems then dating back to 2004?

Mr. KING: Well, I think - the problems are involved in scale. So we did 1.3 million new voter registrations across 21 states. Seventy percent of those folks are people of color, half were under the age of 30 and of those 13,000 employees we hired, a small percentage of them didn't do the work and we ended up having to fire them and turn them over to authorities. But that's the only real problem here is involved in the scale.

Now, this lawsuit that we're facing from the Buckeye Institute is a cut-and-paste lawsuit of the exact same false charge, frivolous lawsuit that was filed four years ago and dismissed right after the election. This kind of pre-election stunt is unfortunately a page right out of the Karl Rove playbook. We know that the former secretary of state Blackwell in Ohio, the most notorious vote suppressor in U.S. history who tried to say that you had to have the exact right card stock weight and your voter registration card to have accounted is actually a senior fellow there at the Buckeye Institute, and we know who is behind this.

MARTIN: Are you instituting any additional controls to stop these allegations?

Mr. KING: Well, we've changed significantly over the years, so, you know, eight, 10 years ago we actually did pay by the card, now we do not. As recently as a couple years ago, we didn't have a national call center that called every card three times, we now do. So there have been a number of changes we've made and we will continue to improve our quality control processes, but ultimately, this is a very small mole hill of problems that's being turned into a mountain by an organized effort by the Republican right to sow doubts in the minds of these new voters to try to prevent them from turning out on November 4th.

MARTIN: Austin King is a spokesperson for ACORN. He joined us from New Orleans, and I thank you so much for joining us.

Mr. KING: It is a pleasure to be here. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.