Charges allege state’s worst voter-signup fraud

SEATTLE – King County prosecutors filed felony charges Thursday against seven people in what a top official described as the worst case of voter-registration fraud in state history, while the organization they worked for agreed to keep a better eye on its employees and pay $25,000 to defray costs of the investigation.

The seven submitted about 1,800 registration cards last fall on behalf of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which had hired them at $8 an hour to sign people up to vote, according to charging documents filed in Superior Court.

Secretary of State Sam Reed told a news conference it was clearly Washington’s most serious instance of voter registration fraud.

“This was an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls of King County,” said Dan Satterberg, the interim King County prosecutor.

Satterberg, Reed and other officials stressed that the defendants were motivated by financial gain rather than any desire to toy with the outcome of an election. They said that in one sense, ACORN was victimized because it paid for voter-registration work that was never performed.

But in interviews with King County Sheriff’s Detective Chris Johnson, several of the defendants – while freely admitting they forged the forms – insisted that they had been told ACORN would shut down their office in Tacoma if they didn’t improve their numbers, Johnson wrote in a probable cause statement.

One, Ryan Olson, said another worker in the office told him “do what you have to do” to turn in more cards.

ACORN’s oversight of the workers was virtually nonexistent – to the extent that civil charges could have been warranted, Satterberg said.

In a settlement agreement announced Thursday, ACORN, which cooperated with the investigation, agreed to pay $25,000 and to make improvements in its management, training and oversight of suspect voter registrations throughout the state.

The Washington state probe began after King County election workers in October spotted apparently forged voter-registration cards among about 1,800 that were turned in by ACORN. The cards arrived a day after they were due for the November election.

Investigators determined that no votes were cast from the fraudulent voter registrations.

None of the defendants could immediately be reached for comment.