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Deputy Hennepin County Attorney Pat Diamond said the worker was accused of failing to forward some registration cards to election officials within 10 days of gathering them. Diamond wouldn’t say how many registrations.
Minnesota ACORN, which advocates for low-income families, has been working to register new voters all year and announced Tuesday it has signed up more than 43,000 people.
Diamond said none of the people registered by the worker would have any problem voting, even if the registrations were turned in late.
The Minnesota ACORN effort was part of a national effort by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, that the group says registered 1.3 million young people, minorities and poor and working-class voters.
Some of those registration cards have become the focus of fraud investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least five other states. Election officials in Ohio and North Carolina also recently questioned the group’s voter forms.
Minnesota ACORN political director Chris Stinson said the organization is working with the Hennepin County attorney’s office. He said he didn’t know how many cards were involved.
“The only thing that I can think of that would have kept us from turning stuff in right away is our quality control procedure,” Stinson said.
He said every card collected shows who the canvasser was, and is checked visually by the canvasser’s supervisor and then by a quality control manager. The group attempts to reach each applicant by phone two or three times to make sure they filled out the cards before forwarding them in to election officials, Stinson said.
Diamond said the investigation is focused on the person who gathered the registrations.
“We have no indication there would be any responsibility on the part of ACORN,” Diamond said.
He said the Hennepin County attorney is investigating the allegation because it involves enforcement of election law.
A spokesman in the secretary of state’s office didn’t immediately know what the possible penalties were for turning in cards late.
