ACORN registers 65,000 New Mexicans to vote

ACORN turned in its 65,000th voter-registration application of the year to the Bernalillo County clerk on Tuesday. In a news release, the group claimed that shattered all previous records for voter-registration drives in New Mexico.

“Working families are going to be heard in this election,” ACORN member Maria Penado said in the release.

ACORN has focused its voter-registration efforts this year on minority voters in Bernalillo, Doña Ana, Santa Fe, Sandoval and Valencia counties. The majority of registrations were in Bernalillo County, the release states, but about 10,000 were from Doña Ana County.

ACORN plans to phone, mail and visit the new voters to encourage them to vote. In 2004, according to the release, 65 percent of the 35,540 voters that ACORN registered voted in response to a similar voter-mobilization program.

The group has made headlines for other reasons in recent months. In June, Doña Ana County warned that it had received complaints about misleading voter-registration activities by ACORN employees, a charge ACORN denied. Also in June, 90 completed voter-registration applications were stolen from ACORN’s Las Cruces office.

Earlier this month, the state Republican Party and others hammered ACORN for hiring convicted felons to register voters. In response, ACORN started performing background checks on people it hires.