What Are The Basic Facts About ACORN’s National Voter Registration Drive?

Starting in 2007, ACORN and Project Vote undertook what became the largest non-partisan voter registration drive in United States' history. It was undertaken for one basic reason: the electorate does not reflect the citizenry of the United States of America. It skews whiter, older, more educated and more affluent than the citizenry as a whole. If all eligible minorities had voted at the rate of non-Hispanic Whites, more than 7.5 million additional Americans would have participated in the 2006 elections.

• ACORN’s 2008 Voter Registration Drive helped 1.3 million people register to vote in 21 states.
• 60-70% are people of color, predominantly African-Americans and Latinos.
• 50% are under the age of 30. almost all are from low-income backgrounds.
• 13,000 people helped register their friends, family members, and people in their communities

ACORN has the most sophisticated quality control system in the country.

• Most states require every card collected to be turned in whether it is a valid application or not.
• ACORN calls each card collected up to three times to ascertain the information on it is legitimate and complete.
• All suspicious cards are flagged, set aside, and delivered to the board of elections under a cover sheet that describes the problems.
• Almost all the cards submitted to the boards of elections that have been noted as “possibly fraudulent” were caught by ACORN’s quality control procedures first.
• ACORN does not use a "quota" or "bounty" system for paying employees. Everyone is paid an hourly wage with no bonus for attaining a specific number of cards. ACORN does set standards because, as any employer, it does not want to pay for no work; however these standards are flexible in order to meet the conditions on the ground. For example, late in the season many more people are registered, so managers expect canvassers to return with fewer cards per day. Following a rigid quota would hinder the drive from maximizing success.
• ACORN has zero tolerance for fraud and fires employees caught by our quality control systems immediately.

Submission of fraudulent cards is actually fraud against ACORN.

• Any large voter registration operation will have a small percentage of workers who turn in bogus registration forms. Their goal clearly is not to cast a fraudulent vote.  It is simply to defraud their employer, ACORN, by getting a paycheck without earning it. ACORN is the victim of this fraud – not the perpetrator.
• ACORN employees filling out fraudulent cards and turning them in is akin to Best Buy employees shoplifting, yet no one accuses Best Buy of being a “quasi-criminal organization”, as Republican National Committee General Counsel Sean Cairncross has called ACORN, because it is being defrauded by dishonest employees.This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, these charges are outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated.
• Most of the 13,000 employees engaged in the voter registration drive were committed to its goals, hard-working and honest. They are frustrated and upset with the very small percentage who tried to get paid for not doing work and have given partisan operatives the opportunity to falsely accuse ACORN of breaking the law.

To see a map of all of ACORN's 2008 voter registrations please click here.