It turns out the folks at ACORN have less influence in presidential elections than either they or their right-wing opponents would have you believe.

The left-leaning activist group was embarrassed last week when seven people, six of them ACORN workers, were charged in Allegheny County with 51 counts of forgery and other violations of election law.

There's no indication any of the fraudulent registrations resulted in fraudulent votes, District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said.

On the contrary, what these canvassers were doing was ripping off their employer, ACORN. They falsified registration forms so they could meet the daily expectation of 20 registrations in a five-hour work day. That way they could keep their $8-an-hour jobs.

ACORN officials deny there was a quota, which would be illegal in Pennsylvania, but let's put that question aside for the moment.

The important points are:

• Early reports last October by Project Vote and ACORN that they had "succeeded in helping over 1.3 million Americans register to vote" should be knocked back by at least several hundred thousand.

• The cherished right-wing mythology about a sinister organization "stealing" an election is a bunch of hooey. The phony info in this registration drive did nothing but cause massive filing headaches for county election workers and make ACORN pay for what it didn't get. These phantoms were created to go on a page for pay, not to go to the polls.

ACORN claimed to have registered 38,000 new voters in southwestern Pennsylvania last year, but that's looking very shaky now. While there are only 51 forgery counts here, and ACORN officials themselves spotlighted forms they thought suspicious, they couldn't have gotten them all. Not when ACORN's system is based on unrealistic expectations.

Finding 20 unregistered voters in every five-hour shift isn't as easy as it might sound. In September 2004, I walked with a trio of ACORN workers through Beltzhoover, a largely black neighborhood south of Mount Washington. It was a nice day, we met nice people, and I thought the 23-year-old guy I walked with did a good job in registering two voters in the hour we door-knocked.

You can't make unregistered voters appear if they aren't on a given block or won't come to the door, yet what I saw as a productive afternoon would warrant additional training, according to ACORN standards.

That worker I walked with in 2004, Mario W. Grisom, was among those charged with fraudulent sign-ups in 2008 -- and he was fired for cutting corners in a previous year, too. The complaint against another person charged last week, Bryan A. Williams, says he filled out multiple applications, though he was already registered to vote, to help canvassers meet their quota.

Now, you might ask, if these phony signatures and Social Security numbers don't come off the page and go to the polls, what difference does it make? Well, though it might not skew an election, it does gum up the works.

"When forms come in, we have to process them," Mark Wolosik, county elections manager, said. "When these forms come in from registration drives, they're in large bundles. We sometimes get thousands at a time."

Each form coming to the Election Division has to be time-stamped and counted. But picking up patterns isn't easy when a roomful of elections workers divvy up the forms. Even without fraud, about every fourth or fifth form coming in is a duplicate of an existing voter, Mr. Wolosik said. Sometimes people don't realize they're already registered or don't realize they don't have to re-register to vote again.

In the grand scheme, Mr. Wolosik said, there weren't many outright fraudulent registrations.

Even so, the people at Project Vote, who launched the $18 million national registration drive with ACORN in 2008, should be feeling ripped off and embarrassed.

I tried to reach Project Vote's executive director, Michael Slater, for two days last week but never succeeded. He must not have a quota of columnists to reach, but Project Vote should be looking for a better way of registering voters in 2012. There is no excuse for anyone to deliberately falsify documents, but ACORN's current "standards" invite trouble.

Project Vote should also be more modest in its claims. Early last October, it announced it helped more than 1.3 million Americans register to vote but, before that month was out, it amended its claim to "nearly 1 million."

Perhaps 30 percent of registration applications "will be incomplete, will fail to match in government systems, or will be from people who did not realize they were already registered," Project Vote said. "Less than 1 to 2 percent will turn out to be deliberately falsified by canvassers."

Just for the record, 2 percent of 1.3 million is 26,000. That's still a lot of bad paper. Until canvassers are given a more realistic workday expectation, don't expect that number to shrink.