On July 22, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now filed a lawsuit in federal court in Pittsburgh against the Republican attorney general of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, and the Democratic district attorney of Allegheny County, Stephen A. Zappala Jr., to enjoin them from enforcing a law that makes it a crime to "give, solicit or accept payment or financial incentive to obtain a voter registration if the payment or incentive is based upon the number of registrations or applications obtained."

ACORN argues that the law precludes it "from hiring and paying employees to advance the organization's goal of registering eligible voters, thereby imposing a severe burden on ACORN's First and Fourteenth Amendment rights."

ACORN has been accused nationally of paying its employees based on the number of voter registrations they turn in at the end of the day. If daily "quotas" are not reached, employees eventually are fired. This encourages the gathering of fraudulent or duplicate registrations.

The attorney general of Nevada found this practice to violate that state's anti-quota law and is currently prosecuting ACORN as an organization and some of its employees. In Pittsburgh, Mr. Zappala was investigating whether to charge ACORN with a violation of the same type of anti-quota law when ACORN filed the lawsuit in federal court challenging Pennsylvania's anti-quota law.

First, let's dispense with a couple of technicalities. ACORN asserts that its voter registration drives are nonpartisan, but it is clear that they occur in battleground states and target congressional races that are in play. They are driven by partisan politics.

Second, even though the Pennsylvania statute has been on the books for seven years, ACORN and the American Civil Liberties Union began trying to declare it unconstitutional only after Mr. Zappala started an investigation to find out if ACORN, and several ACORN employees, had violated it.

More importantly, the state election code at issue that makes it a crime to "give, solicit, or accept payment or financial incentive to obtain a voter registration if the payment or incentive is based upon the number of registrations or applications obtained" is clearly constitutional.

The United States Constitution, under Article I, Section 4, delegates to the states the authority to conduct and regulate elections. The U.S. Supreme Court in Smiley v. Holm held in 1932 that the "comprehensive words" of this section "embrace authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections, not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes [and] duties of inspectors and canvassers."

ACORN receives from its funders approximately $17 per registration card it obtains. As a whistleblower testified, ACORN wanted 1.5 million registrations in 2008 because of the money it would receive. Therefore, ACORN didn't particularly care about the huge number of fraudulent and/or duplicate registrations it turned in.

The push for a huge number of registrations, without regard to their validity, led ACORN to establish quotas for registrations obtained per day. If employees did not obtain those numbers, they were fired. The fear of being fired led some of them to create fraudulent or duplicate registrations. These registrations flooded county election divisions across Pennsylvania in the last weeks of the registration period, causing a multitude of problems.

While ACORN and its ACLU lawyers may profess that ACORN's voter registration drives attempt to register only those who by lack of knowledge or inadvertence failed to register, the reality is that their drives are big money makers that cause chaos for election divisions. This is exactly the harm the statute was intended to prevent.

You can best believe that ACORN and the ACLU will use this case to strike down anti-quota statutes across the country if they are successful in having Pennsylvania's anti-quota statute unconstitutional.

Let's hope the statute will be upheld. Then, Mr. Zappala, in addition to investigating ACORN for violating the solicitation of registration statute, also could investigate ACORN's funders.

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