Voter Registration Fraud in IL - ACORN not involved

An "unprecedented volume" of voter registration forms are coming into the Lake County clerk's office with fictitious or incorrect information, officials announced Friday.

More than 1,000 voter-registration requests have been submitted with addresses that don't exist or for people who don't live at the addresses given, county clerk Willard Helander said.

One even had information for a local resident's dead goldfish, she said; another bore the name of a pet dog.

"This is unprecedented," Helander said during the afternoon news conference. "We've got a serious problem."

The suspicious applications came to the clerk's office from different sources.

Hundreds were hand-delivered by a man from Chicago who'd worked on voter-registration drives. Helander declined to identify the man Friday, but said she's turned over his name to investigators.

They included addresses that had Lake County ZIP codes but actually were in Chicago, Govain said. Others bore signatures in the same handwriting but different names.

"There was a lot of weird stuff going on," he said.

Other suspicious forms were mailed to homes by the Voter Participation Center, a project run by a Washington D.C. group called Women's Voices, Women Vote, the forms themselves indicate.

According to its Web site, the center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization "dedicated to increasing the voice of unmarried Americans" by encouraging them to register and vote.

Those forms included pre-printed personal information, including names, birth dates and partial Social Security Numbers, Helander said.

Many forms generated by the group and received by the clerk's office were legitimate, Helander said, while many others included incorrect information. Some were mailed to people at addresses where they didn't live, Helander said; some were mailed to dead people; others were mailed to pets.