Judge fines ACORN $5,000 for voter registration scheme

A judge Wednesday slapped the defunct grass-roots community organizing group ACORN with a maximum $5,000 fine for its role in a voter registration compensation scheme in the 2008 election cycle.

District Judge Donald Mosley was confined by statute to fine only the corporation, which pleaded guilty in April to one count of felony compensation for registration of voters.

Mosley said that if there were an individual standing before him, and not a corporation, that person would have been given a 10-year prison sentence, “and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.”

The judge chastised the now-bankrupt corporation for making a “mockery” of the nation’s election process. “This isn’t a banana republic,” Mosley said.

The state will have a difficult time recouping the fine. When the national organization closed its doors in April 2010, the group had assets totaling less than $4,000 and “liabilities of more than $4 million,” according to court records.

ACORN, which maintained that it did not authorize the compensation program, allowed its criminal defense attorney, Lisa Rasmussen, to negotiate the case in April.

Prosecutors said ACORN authorized a Las Vegas field operative to run an illegal voter-registration program during the 2008 election cycle that paid cash to encourage workers to sign up voters.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also had an illegal quota policy that forced workers to register a certain number of people per shift or face termination, authorities alleged.

As part of the guilty plea agreement, state prosecutors dropped 12 other felony counts against the organization and did not argue during the sentencing hearing.

ACORN’s two co-defendants already had taken plea deals.

Amy Busefink in November pleaded no contest to two counts of conspiracy to commit the crime of compensation for registration of voters, a gross misdemeanor.

She is appealing to the Nevada Supreme Court and challenging the constitutionality of the statute.

Nevada law makes it illegal “for a person to provide compensation for registering voters that is based upon the total number of voters a person registers.”

The field operative who created and ran the incentive program, Christopher Edwards, is serving three years of probation after pleading guilty to two gross misdemeanors.

Busefink is a longtime employee of Project Vote, a national grass-roots organization that registers voters and worked in partnership with ACORN in 2008. Busefink, who oversaw Edwards, was sentenced to a year of probation in January.

ACORN officials maintained that Edwards was ordered not to run the incentive program.

The program, called Blackjack or 21-Plus, rewarded workers with $5 extra per shift if they brought in 21 or more completed voter registration cards.

An investigation of the compensation scheme was launched after several false registrations were turned in to the county registrar of voters. One such group of registration forms contained names from the Dallas Cowboys football team, but those fraudulent forms were shown not to have come from ACORN workers, Rasmussen said.

Prosecutors never charged anyone with turning in a fraudulent form.

The 40-year-old group, which once counted President Barack Obama among its ranks in Chicago, came under fire in recent years for its voter registration tactics.

Conservatives condemned it as a pro-Democrat group engaging in partisan political activities, which violated the tax-exempt status of some of its affiliates.

Congress effectively killed off the group when it slashed the organization’s federal funding after a hidden-camera sting by conservative operatives showing ACORN workers giving advice on illegal activities.

Contact reporter Francis McCabe at fmccabe@review journal.com or 702-380-1039.