Voter registration cards found in car

CRIME:A former employee of an organization that registered voters kept hundreds of cards instead of submitting them.

BY PATRICK SWEENEY

ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS   16 October 2004

ST. PAUL - When police at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport stopped a man for running a stop sign late last month, they found an unusual stash in his car trunk: More than 300 voter registration cards that had been filled out but never submitted to the Minnesota secretary of state.

The motorist allegedly told police that he was an ex-employee of Associated Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, a group that has been conducting a voter registration drive in Minnesota for a year.

Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar said Thursday her staff is investigating allegations involving the man in connection with his voter registration work.

"Charges are likely to be filed next week," Klobuchar said.

Acorn boasts of having registered 1 million voters across the country since last fall. In Minnesota, the liberal group says it has registered 36,000 voters.

The man stopped at the airport is Joshua Reed, 19, of St. Louis Park, Minn. He faces two unrelated criminal charges, a felony drug case in Hennepin County and a misdemeanor shoplifting case being prosecuted by the St. Louis Park city attorney.

Now he faces an investigation that could lead to felony charges against him or perhaps others for violating election laws. The law requires that cards be submitted to the secretary of state within 10 days of being filled out and signed, but the cards found in the car trunk were weeks or months old.

After the stop, airport police seized the voter registration cards, and an investigator took them to the secretary of state's office, where workers photocopied the cards and returned them to police to hold as evidence.

Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer asked metro-area county election officials to accept the photocopies as valid registrations.

All but a handful of the affected voters, those whose cards became illegible because of water damage in the car trunk, apparently are now validly registered.

But there is another issue. The cards contained several pieces of sensitive personal data that would make them a lucrative target for anyone seeking to commit identity theft.

Airport police refused to comment on the case. Klobuchar said she could not comment further, other than to say the airport police are doing the bulk of the investigation.

Much of what is publicly known about the case comes from a memo written by Bert Black, a legal analyst in Kiffmeyer's office. In the memo, Black said investigators told him that Reed "indicated he had been fired from Acorn for making copies of the cards." Becky Gomer, the head organizer in Minnesota for Acorn, denied that Reed was discharged for copying cards. "That's absolutely not true," she said.

"He wasn't meeting standards," Gomer said of Reed. "He didn't check in."

She said Reed was one of a number of canvassers whom Acorn paid $1 for each new voter registration they secured.

Minnesota Republican Party officials seized on the case Thursday to suggest that the voter registration system could be abused by employees or volunteers in any of the mostly Democratic groups conducting voter registration drives in Minnesota.

"This incident raises many other questions, including how many voter registration cards are sitting in the car trunks of Acorn employees?" Corey Miltimore, executive director of the state Republican Party, said Thursday.