El Paso ACORN free of questionable voter registrants
Diana Washington Valdez / El Paso Times
Article Launched: 10/14/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT
EL PASO -- The ACORN office in El Paso registered about 4,500 new voters this summer, or nearly 20 percent of all the county's new registered voters.
"I'm very proud of the work we did in El Paso," said Jose Manuel Escobedo, ACORN's regional organizer in El Paso and South Texas. "It's always very hard to pull in volunteers to canvass, whether it's door-to-door and in high foot traffic areas like we did, but we had very good quality control procedures in place."
The Republican National Committee has focused on ACORN's voter registration complaints in other states, including in New Mexico, but no problems have surfaced in El Paso.
"We talked to them (ACORN) and others early on, and let them know we didn't want to see those kinds of problems in El Paso," El Paso County Elections Administrator Javier Chacon said.
Thanks to voter registration drives this year, El Paso ended up with 25,000 new registered voters, according to election statistics.
To prevent fraud, "we check voter registration applications against our voter registration rolls, we check their Texas driver's license and Social Security number through the state. We have not run into any unusual problems," Chacon said.
In New Mexico, ACORN conducted the single largest voter-registration drive in that state, signing up nearly 80,000 new voters. The FBI is looking into complaints in Bernalillo County involving 1,400 suspicious registrations, but it was not clear whether ACORN had anything to do with those registrations. And, in Las Vegas, state election officials raided the ACORN office there after receiving complaints of numerous fraudulent voter registrations.
National ACORN leaders have denied any wrongdoing, and accused critics of wanting to erase votes cast by low-income people.
Typically, officials said, between 3 and 5 percent of El Paso voter registration applications get tossed out or set aside, mainly because they are missing a signature or other required item.
"I'm not aware of any problems in El Paso with voter registrations," said Michael Moore, chairman of the El Paso GOP. "We have a good relationship with the elections office. We have a greater problem with low election turnouts overall."
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