Officials yesterday raided the Las Vegas headquarters of a major pro-Obama community-organizing group as part of a probe into alleged voter fraud that includes using the names of Dallas Cowboy players on sham registrations.
At least four Nevada agents swept into the offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, in the morning with a search warrant.
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They took away boxes of documents and several computers related to registrations signed up through ACORN’s Project Vote, according to state Secretary of State spokesman Bob Walsh.
Among the allegations were that “voter applications were being submitted with false information, and others were being submitted with duplicate information,” he said.
Walsh claimed there were reports from investigators that the names of Cowboys football players had been used on some of the dummied voter registrations.
“Tony Romo is not registered to vote in the state of Nevada, and anybody trying to pose as Terrell Owens won’t be able to cast a ballot on Nov. 4,” said Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller, who is a Democrat.
The warrant stemmed from a probe into potential voter fraud by the group.
ACORN interim head Bertha Lewis insisted her group has been working to pluck out the phony forms its workers have submitted.
“Today’s raid by the secretary of state’s office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than to discredit our work registering Nevadans,” Lewis said.
She added that over the past 10 months, ACORN workers have turned over problem registrations to officials – and gave them information for a probe.
And she said her group handed over 46 applications given by 33 ex-workers to election officials in the Vegas area, where ACORN registered 80,000 people.
But the raid came as Republicans have been hammering ACORN – whose political-action committee has endorsed Barack Obama for president.
Obama was a community organizer in Chicago, where he worked closely with ACORN and steered funding to the organization.
There have been probes of ACORN voter-drive activities in several other states, including Indiana and New Mexico. Yesterday, Republicans claimed that in Lake County, Ind., ACORN delivered 2,000 new voter registration forms – and 1,100 weren’t legitimate.
The officials claimed that in several instances, ACORN workers yanked names and addresses straight from phone books and faked signatures.
Additional reporting by Jeane Macintosh in Cleveland