7-YR.-OLD GETS AN ACORN VOTE

**5711-Marine** · October 13th, 2008, 12:46 PM

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS and SUSAN EDELMAN in New York and MELISSA KLEIN in Bridgeport, Conn.

YOU KIDDING? A voter-registration card for 7-year-old O'jahnae Smith, submitted by volunteer group ACORN, claimed she was 27.

Posted: 4:23 am
October 12, 2008

O'jahnae Smith is ready and registered to vote this November.

There's only one problem: She's 7 years old.

The Connecticut girl is 11 years too young - and nobody in her family knows how she ended up on a voter registration form submitted by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

"She's registered to vote?" said a surprised Jerome Smith, O'jahnae's teenage brother. "She's too young to vote."

But that didn't stop someone from forging the child's signature on a voter registration card and giving her a fake birth date that upped her age to 27. The family told The Post a drug-addicted relative may have given the bogus card to ACORN.

Voter registration fraud complaints like these continue to mount for the group, already under scrutiny in 11 states where hundreds, if not thousands, of new registrations are being questioned.

ACORN volunteers have been found to register dead people and even put members of the Dallas Cowboys on Nevada lists.

The community organizing group has a long history of flooding low- and middle-income neighborhoods in election years with temporary workers instructed to register 20 to 25 voters per day - or risk getting fired.

Most states prohibit paying per signature, but ACORN workers earning $8 to $9 an hour still have to hit their quotas. And many need the money - including some ex-cons in work-release programs.

ACORN's controversial tactics have fueled John McCain's criticism of Barack Obama, whose campaign paid an ACORN spinoff - Community Services Inc. - about $800,000 to knock on doors and urge people to vote for Obama in four key primary states: Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

In his pre-politics days, Obama ran the Illinois chapter of Project Vote in 1992, before it hooked up with ACORN.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis on Friday called for a freeze on taxpayer dollars to ACORN until recent allegations have been investigated.

Meanwhile, state authorities in New Mexico, Indiana, Missouri, Connecticut, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Nevada have launched probes of bogus voter registration forms filed by ACORN.

Roberta Casteel, a nurse, is one of several dozen Nevada voters caught in the web of fake ACORN registrations. Casteel, a registered voter since 1991, was shocked to receive a letter rejecting a voter application she didn't know she'd made.

Authorities said they'd received two voter applications in her name: one as a Democrat and one as an independent. Both cards had her address, date of birth and Social Security number, and were submitted by ACORN workers. Neither signature matched her original one on file.

A former ACORN worker in Pennsylvania has already been charged with 17 counts of identity theft and forgery.

Other states are sifting through cartons of suspicious forms.

The ACORN shenanigans likely won't rise to actual voting fraud, stressed election law expert Terri Enns at Ohio State University.

"ACORN's problematic registrations create extra work for election boards, because they have to check them, but it's not double voting," she said.

Additional reporting by Al Branch and Bob Shemeligian

gotis@nypost.com