Five Wisconsin lawmakers are asking the Wisconsin Department of Justice to investigate a political advocacy organization’s potential actions to defraud state voters in the upcoming election.
In separate letters filed Wednesday, the legislators asked Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to take action against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a group that aims to organize lower and middle-income communities for various causes.
Allegations of voter fraud have soured ACORN’s reputation among some politicians, who point to recent allegations of widespread voter fraud and subsequent raids on an ACORN office in Nevada as evidence of widespread impropriety.
The letters were sent by Republican congressmen Jim Sensenbrenner, Jim Ryan and Tom Petri as well as Republican state senators Ted Kanavas and Rich Zipperer, both of Brookfield.
“ACORN is a tax-exempt organization with a long and detailed history of engaging in illegal political activity, including vote fraud,” Sensenbrenner wrote in his letter. “I am dumbfounded at the audacity of some members of ACORN in their apparent willingness to disregard the laws of our country.”
In his letter, Sensenbrenner scorned what he called fraudulent means by which ACORN has affected the electoral process and expressed his desire to see legal action pursued against them.
Conor Sweeney, a spokesperson for Ryan, said an investigation would at the very least clear the air as far as voter fraud allegations are concerned.
“The legality of the activities undertaken by this tax-exempt organization has been called into question,” Sweeney said in an e-mail to The Badger Herald. “A thorough investigation will help answer these questions.”
ACORN representatives were unavailable for comment Wednesday but issued a statement on their website calling voter fraud charges “bogus.”
“ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations,” the statement read. “And in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening, we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law enforcement.”
In the statement, ACORN said any organization of its size will inevitably have some employees or volunteers who violate laws, and those employees participating in fraudulent voter registration did so not because they wanted to cast a phony vote, but rather to scam ACORN into giving them a paycheck when they didn’t earn it.
Wisconsin DOJ spokesperson Kevin St. John said though he could not confirm or deny whether his department was actively investigating ACORN in Wisconsin, the DOJ can and will take any appropriate steps to ensure voter fraud is absent in the upcoming election.
“Attorney General Van Hollen believes voter laws should be enforced,” St. John said. “Electoral fraud is real in Wisconsin. Where there is fraud, the perpetrators will be punished.”
The same day the letters to Van Hollen were sent, the state Attorney General’s office brought charges against Frank Walton, a special registration deputy for the city of Milwaukee accused of phony voter registration. This was the third such case filed by the state’s nascent Election Fraud Task Force.
