ALBUQUERQUE — FBI agents were meeting Friday with the Bernalillo County clerk after she notified them about an estimated 1,400 possibly fraudulent voter registration cards.

The number of suspect cards has grown from the 1,100 that Maggie Toulouse Oliver told law enforcement agencies about last month. Cards have been turned in to the clerk's office over the entire year, but the number of voter registrations increased significantly in recent weeks as this week's deadline for registering for the Nov. 4 election approached.

The clerk's office sent a follow-up letter to the U.S. attorney, the state attorney general and the District Attorney's Office two weeks ago, and the FBI called to set up the meeting, Toulouse Oliver said.

"We will cooperate and give them whatever information they ask for," she said.

The U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., would not comment. Laura Sweeney, a spokeswoman for the department, said it does not confirm or deny any investigation.

The state Attorney General's Office also is investigating.

Phil Sisneros, a spokesman for Attorney General Gary King, said the office is in the preliminary stage of looking at suspicious registrations to see how they might be linked to the various groups that were registering voters.

"We have a list of registered agents, and this involves cross-referencing to find out who that registered agent was or who that group was," Sisneros said.

The cards have not been linked to any particular group. Toulouse Oliver said some registrations have tracking data to help find out how they were submitted, but others do not.

"We haven't done any analysis. We're leaving that up to law enforcement," she said.

An advocacy group for low-income people, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been accused in Nevada and other states of submitting registrations with false or duplicated information.

Matthew Henderson, head organizer for the local ACORN group, said it gives the clerk's office two stacks of cards each day — one considered ready to process to go on the voter rolls and the other "problematic."

Some problem cards are incomplete — such as lacking a Social Security number — but others are considered to be fraudulent, with the names of famous people or names copied out of the telephone book, Henderson said.

"We were able to identify most of the cards we thought were fishy," he said. The organization also has fired about 46 workers this year, out of a total of 600, after they turned in bad registrations, Henderson said.

ACORN, which has collected 80,000 new voter registrations throughout the year, submitted a cover sheet with each suspect card, he said. The organization has been doing that since January so the clerk's office would not process any bad cards and so anyone who turned in false registrations could be identified and prosecuted, he said.

County clerks' offices check registrations as they come in. Cards raise red flags, for example, if they have the same name as a voter who's already registered but carry a different birth date or Social Security number or have addresses that don't exist, Toulouse Oliver said. "That's usually where we identify discrepancies or potential fraud issues," she said.

Her office tries to contact the voter to see if a mistake can be corrected, but if that's not possible, the card goes into the questionable pile and is not added to the voter rolls.

"I would say we have a good quality control system within the confines of state and federal law," Toulouse Oliver said. "We have pretty good resources at our disposal."




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