ACORN V indicated, NY Times artile small, hard to find

A newreporton the community group Acorn by the
nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has found no evidence of
fraudulent voting or of violations of federal financing rules by the
group in the past five years.

RepresentativeJohn Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan and chairman of
the House Judiciary Committee, requested the report along with
RepresentativeBarney
Frank, Democrat of
Massachusetts. Mr. Conyers released the report on Tuesday.

Acorn, which stands for
theAssociation of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, has drawn fire from conservative activists who have
accused it of conducting fraudulent voter registration drives in poor
neighborhoods, adding imaginary voters like Mickey Mouse to the rolls.
The report by the research service, an arm of theLibrary of
Congress, said,
however, that a search using the Nexis news database "did not
identify any reported instances of such individuals attempting to vote
at the polls."

Hans A. von
Spakovsky, a
formerFederal Election
Commissionmember
under PresidentGeorge
W. Bush, said the new
report could not resolve the voting fraud issue, since "no one is
ever going to know it unless somebody takes the voter registration
list and checks each person who is registered to make sure they are a
real person."

The report also stated that
two conservative activists might have broken privacy laws in
California and Maryland by posing as a prostitute and pimp while
secretly videotaping Acorn staff members who gave them advice on
evading taxes and hiding their activities. The two states "appear to
ban" the recording of face-to-face conversations without the consent
of all participants, the report said.

Another part of the new
report suggested that efforts by Congress to cut Acorn's financing
could be unconstitutional bills of attainder, a term referring to
punishments ordered by Congress against specific individuals or
entities.
On Tuesday,
JudgeNina
Gershonof Federal
District Court in Brooklyn issued a one-page order supporting
Acorn's challenge to the legislation on bill-of-attainder grounds.
This month, Judge Gershon ruled that cutting the group's financing
was an illegal bill of attainder. In Tuesday's order, she denied a
motion by the Justice Department to reconsider her previous
ruling.