After it’s done, the Orlando event will live on as part of a two-hour compendium of similar pastor briefings, which will be sold for broadcast in homes and churches as part of a coordinated effort targeting unregistered Christian voters.

The Florida briefing mimics a pastor briefing held by the Iowa Renewal Project in Des Moines in March, which featured Huckabee, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and GOP presidential contenders Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, as our sister site the Iowa Independent previously reported.

At least 14 states have held “renewal project” events, attracting nearly 10,000 pastors nationwide, including in Texas. Led by the influential evangelical organizer Lane in 2005, the Texas Restoration Project meant mobilized conservative pastors and their congregation to vote.

The series of meetings were held during a Perry reelection campaign, and no prospective candidate but the governor was invited to the meetings. The last event centered on celebrating Perry’s 2007 win.

The meetings have prompted legal scrutiny from watchdog groups in the past, which called on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the legality of distributing candidate-specific voter guides, and whether the nonprofit financing the Texas briefings had urged churches to assist in Perry’s reelection campaign efforts — political activity that would have jeopardized the foundation’s tax-exempt status.

The Houston-based nonprofit Niemoller Foundation spent roughly $1.26 million to fund the six meetings, money doled out by a handful of major Perry campaign donors like San Antonio businessman James Leininger and Houston homebuilder Bob Perry. While some topics discussed at the event “appeared” to foster political intervention, the IRS eventually decided the group didn’t violate its tax-exempt status.

During the Iowa briefings Lane is quoted as saying, “What we’re doing with the pastor meetings is spiritual, but the end result is political. From my perspective, our country is going to hell because pastors won’t lead from the pulpits,” in an April New York Times story, where he is later described as “a stealth weapon for the right.”

Scheduled at Orlando’s Rosen Centre luxury hotel, the briefing features Dobson, Texas-based WallBuilders CEO and controversial U.S. historian David Barton, and former U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen, all of whom endorsed “The Response” in August. Like Perry, GOP presidential contender and former U.S. Speaker of the House Gingrich is invited but has yet to confirm his attendance.

If Perry and Gingrich do show up, their presence will likely make the Florida Pastor Policy Briefing closer in significance to the Iowa meetings, as both are high-profile Republican White House hopefuls. The influential briefings serve to galvanize dormant voters in the pews in preparation for the 2012 elections, a mission amplified by an ambitious new California-based voter mobilization effort, Champion the Vote (CTV).

Following “The Response,” American Family Association founder Don Wildmon sent a an e-mail message to those who’d registered for the event, encouraging them to become involved in the group’s effort to register 5 million new conservative Christian voters. To achieve the goal, CTV is asking 100,000 “champions” to register 50 people in their community, as the Texas Independent recently reported.

Bill Dallas, head of United in Purpose (UiP), the group leading the CTV initiative, has created a business and carefully crafted voter mobilization model around the event by fusing repackaged media and a detailed data mining project to reach those committed unregistered Christian voters.

Dallas’ crew plans to film the meetings and edit them down to a two-hour session called “One Nation Under God.” The repackaged event will be aired on Nov. 12 and can then be purchased by “host” churches and individuals.

Dallas expects about 1,000 “house parties” and 2-300 churches to take part in the November event. The hosts are not only instructed to air the reformatted briefing but have undergone an intensive eight week voter mobilization training session with CTV that include Webinars, conference calls, newsletters and a training kit. The hosts make up CTV’s base– the ‘champions’ assigned to reach out to the thousands of potential voters.

“Our last broadcast was to educate, this time we are specifically aiming to mobilize the faith community to get champions ready to help Christians register to vote,” said Dallas, referring to the group’s first foray into broadcast, the repackaging of the Iowa meeting.

A sophisticated data-mining project sets the group’s effort apart. Channeling the aid of UiP’s affluent funders, tech savvy Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the nonprofit organization built an exhaustive database out of purchased, leveraged and organic information. More than 100 million names are pitted against basic voter registration information and personal consumer facts from religious magazine subscriptions to conservative newsletter lists to determine which possible voters are “committed Christians.”

As a 501(c)4 corporation, Dallas’ nonprofit isn’t required to disclose its private funders, who he described as “low-profile, wildly successful individuals” in the tech sector. A recent Los Angeles Times article uncovered some of the private figures bankrolling the effort, including Ken Eldred, a technology entrepreneur and friend of the AFA’s Wildmon.

The financier is now raising campaign cash for Perry’s presidential run, the Times reported. No stranger to backing Republican candidates, Eldred donated $1.1 million to GOP candidates since 2005, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Despite its connection with prominent conservative Republican candidates and right-wing figures, Dallas contends CTV is apolitical.

“We are non-partisan, we are strongly about Christ. Our mission is not raising up individual candidates but about registering voters,” said Dallas.

Non-citizens who attempt to vote can — and often do — face deportation, which opponents of the Arizona law argued is enough to deter fraud. “The penalties against non-citizens registering to vote are very serious and have served Arizonans — and all Americans — well for decades,” Linda Brown of the Arizona Advocacy Network, a plaintiff in the case, said in a press release. The court seemed to take this view by ruling the federal law does not allow states to require would-be voters to prove citizenship. But in other states, politicians are still proposing legislation that would crack down on voting by non-citizens.

Kris Kobach, who is running for Kansas secretary of state and helped draft Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law, has said he wants to require proof of citizenship at polling stations, claiming “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive.” Kobach won support for this idea from likely governor Sam Brownback, who is currently serving as a Republican senator.

Colorado Republican state Rep. Ted Harvey told TWI he plans to introduce a bill requiring documentation for voter registration in the form of a birth certificate or passport.

In Arizona, challengers to the 2004 law said in a press release that the law had prevented citizens who did not have documentation of their citizenship from voting. “We are elated that the Ninth Circuit has properly applied federal election law and struck down the documentary proof of citizenship requirement,” said Jon Greenbaum of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who argued the case for appellants. “This will enable the many poor people in Arizona who lack driver’s licenses and birth certificates to register to vote.”

Is it true? It doesn’t matter, Kansas State University political science professor Joe Aistrup told the Kansas City Star last week. “Kobach has caught the wave of the immigration debate,” he said. “It matters little whether his claims about voter fraud are true. Connect anything to illegal immigration in this climate, it’s going to have traction.”

For Kobach, especially, it’s a strategy that makes sense. Kobach is known around the country as the man who helped write Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law, and he has assisted other states to draft anti-illegal immigration legislation. He is now working with Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce to write legislation denying birthright citizenship to children born to illegal immigrant parents. Kobach’s critics argue his anti-illegal immigration work could distract from official secretary of state duties — he said it is only a hobby and likened himself to another candidate who plays the banjo — but his decision to fight illegal immigrant voter fraud is a perfect way to blend his pet project with a secretary of state priority.

If elected, Kobach wants to require proof of citizenship at the polls, and received backing for his plan from Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kans.), who is almost certain to be elected governor next month.

In Colorado, Republican state Rep. Ted Harvey told me last week he plans to introduce similar legislation for voter registration after 12,000 registered voters in the state failed to check a box affirming they were U.S. citizens. This may not have been because they were not citizens, but Harvey said illegal immigrants could easily register to vote because they do not have to show a birth certificate or passport.

It’s tough to say with certainty that this does not happen. But even for legal immigrants, there can be harsh penalties for registering to vote as a non-citizen. A 1996 law made it illegal for non-citizens to claim citizenship, meaning even those with green cards can face deportation for registering to vote. There is anecdotal evidence that this happens each election to a number of legal immigrants who don’t realize they aren’t allowed to vote.

In Florida, 26.7 percent fewer new voters have registered this year than in 2006. (ZUMA Press)

After more than a decade of success expanding voter rolls, voting rights advocates are noting a disturbing trend in the run-up to the 2010 elections. Dramatically fewer groups are engaged in registering voters during the current election cycle than in previous midterm elections, and fewer voters, especially in poorer areas that are traditionally underrepresented and therefore the usual target of voter registration drives, are registering to vote as a result.

[Congress1] Registration patterns vary significantly from state to state, but 26.7 percent fewer new voters have registered in Florida this year than in 2006, along with 21.4 percent fewer in Maryland and 16.9 percent fewer in Tennessee, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy and law institute at New York University. And while there’s no single cause for the decline, experts point out that many independent organizations are withering under a combination of public attacks by conservative activists alleging voter fraud and new state laws making it difficult for such groups to operate.

“A four-year wave of attacks on voter registration drives, both in terms of state laws that either shut down voter registration drives or made it too onerous to do it, and other public attacks have certainly had an effect,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Project.

And while voter registration drives have languished, state governments aren’t picking up the slack. Voting rights advocates argue that many states aren’t adequately complying with requirements in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to register voters automatically at state agencies and keep their addresses up to date when they move. The result is a gaping hole in the country’s voter registration efforts that threatens to undo the positive strides that have been made over the last decade and a half.

The most obvious cause for the decline in voter registration is the shuttering of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. At its height, ACORN had a budget of close to $35 million and was credited with registering approximately half a million voters in 2008 alone. Amid allegations from conservative activists that the group engaged in widespread voter fraud, Congress voted last fall to defund ACORN, which received approximately a third of its budget in the form of government grants. The rest of the group’s funding soon dried up, and ACORN was forced to cease operations at its approximately 75 field offices soon thereafter.

But rather than rest on the laurels of their victory against ACORN, conservative activists have been emboldened to seek out new organizations engaging in voter registration drives and levy similar accusations against them, creating an increasingly hostile landscape for them to perform their mission.

“I wouldn’t underestimate the public attacks,” says Weiser. “It’s not a law prohibiting you, so it’s a little harder to demonstrate, but the chilling effects have nonetheless been palpable. People are nervous to do drives and support groups that do this kind of work.”

Tea Party groups, revved up by accusations made against ACORN in 2008, have worked to challenge voter registration drives and contest votes on election day in a number of states, including California, Wisconsin and New Mexico. But the clearest example of attacks launched against new groups seeking to register voters occurred in Harris County, Texas, where True The Vote, which is affiliated with the Tea Party group the King Street Patriots, dug through the county’s registrations and accused a voter registration organization called Houston Votes of engaging in widespread voter fraud in August.

The controversy centered on a number of voter registration forms filed by Houston Votes that were rejected because they were linked to vacant lots and people that did not exist. Many of these registrations, Houston Votes argues, had been made in 2008 and 2009 — before the group was founded and when many of the lots still had homes on them. But the damage had been done. King Street Patriots’ leader Catherine Engelbrecht allegedly referred to Houston Votes as the “New Black Panthers’ office”; Houston Votes responded by filing suit for defamation.

“When someone says you’re associated with racists that are trying to kill all white people, then it has a chilling effect on donors willing to give to your organization, which has an effect on the amount of work you can do. That’s pretty simple-minded stuff,” said Jim George, the lawyer representing Houston Votes. In recent months, the group has been forced to slow its activities to registering just 200 votes a day, down from over a 1,000 before the allegations were leveled.

But Tea Party groups pose only part of the problem for organizations hoping to launch voter registration efforts. While the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to make blank mail-in voter registration forms available to organized voter registration programs, many state legislatures, especially since the fear of widespread voter fraud began to rise among conservatives in 2004, have countered with various laws that place burdens on groups hoping to carry out that function.

These new laws, detailed in a report by the Brennan Center, range from enacting stricter-than-usual reporting and filing deadlines for voter registration groups to shifting the cost of providing registration forms onto the groups themselves. In addition, many states have imposed stiff civil and criminal penalties on groups whose members are late or fail to comply with reporting, making engagement in the process overly burdensome or risky for small organizations.

The Republican-controlled state legislature in Florida, for instance, enacted a law so onerous that its constitutionality was successfully challenged in court in 2006 by the League of Women Voters of Florida. The legislature passed a new law in response, however, which a number of groups in Florida point to as the reason why registration efforts in their state are down more than 26 percent from 2006.

“The direct reason this year in particular is because of new legislation signed into law by the Republican state legislature that puts as many obstacles in place as possible as far as third parties hoping to register people to vote,” says Ron Mills, an area leader for the Broward County Democratic Party. “There are all these obstacles and reporting you have to do as if you are a campaign, even though you are a volunteer organization with few professional staff. … It’s got to where even the local Democratic executive committee in Broward County decided they didn’t want to go through the trouble, so we’re not qualified to register voters.”

New voter identification laws, too, are placing burdens on citizens’ ability to register to vote. Arizona, for instance, requires people to supply proof of citizenship to register to vote, and from 2004 to 2008, according to a report from Demos, the liberal public policy research organization, over 38,000 registrations were rejected as a result — despite court documents that indicated 90 percent were from residents born in the United States.

And the states, the Demos report also notes, are not filling in where outside voter drive efforts have fallen off. Many of them are failing to comply with the provisions in the NVRA that require them to keep up with voters’ address changes, which represent approximately a third of all registration activities in a given election cycle.

“If people move — and every four-year cycle it’s approximately 40 percent of the population in total who do so (and it’s more with poor populations) — one of the things that we found doing an investigation about states not complying with NVRA obligations is that they’re not updating registration addresses,” said the Brennan Center’s Weiser. “There was a huge increase in registration in 2008, and we worry with all the foreclosures and moving that a lot of folks on the voter rolls won’t be accurately reflected and might face problems when they try to vote.”

In the long run, a top-notch state voter registration system that complies with the NVRA and automates registration at public assistance agencies, schools and DMVs should be responsible for voter registration. In the meantime, said Weiser, “voter registration drives are the activities that fill that gap so they certainly perform a really needed function. Right now, there’s a very big hole out there.”

Harris County’s election administrator, Beverly Kaufman has scrambled to fill the void, borrowing machines from 15 other Texas counties — and even one in Colorado — as well as printing paper ballots and buying other equipment. Kaufman predicts that by Election Day, Harris County will have up to 5,000 of the usual 5,700 machines they typically field, meaning that each of the county’s 730 polling stations will be one machine short.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of the fire, rumors concerning voter fraud are flying. Voter fraud is actually quite uncommon, so as a rule fears of tampering can be chalked up to paranoia.

But confusion about voting procedures can impact elections, and as TWI sister publication The Texas Independent reported this week, the hubbub in Harris County is rippling over into other counties as well. After Travis County lent Harris a number of its voting machines, an independent group that distrusts voting machines announced that paper ballots would be made available. Not true, reported The Texas Independent:

Travis County had purchased surplus machines to handle large numbers of voters during the 2008 elections (when turnout was above 60 percent), and that the county would be able to accommodate a smaller gubernatorial election (when turnout is typically between 40-50 percent) without the extra machines.

But this kind of false information is exactly what creates false expectations among voters, gins up tension on election day, and leads to accusations of election tampering.

As the court notes in its order, the Bill of Attainder clause has only been successfully invoked five times in the Supreme Court since the Constitution was signed. Still, Judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York ruled that this case may wind up being the sixth.

ACORN and its affiliates, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, “have raised a fundamental issue of separation of powers,” she wrote. “They have been singled out by Congress for punishment that directly and immediately affects their ability to continue to obtain federal funding, in the absence of any judicial, or administrative, process adjudicating guilt. … The public will not suffer harm by allowing the plaintiffs to continue work on contracts duly awarded by federal agencies.”

ACORN and its lawyers claim that Congress voted to cut off funding for the organization, which supports the development of low-income housing and voter registration, as the result of a right-wing public relations campaign against ACORN and others for their efforts to register low-income and largely Democratic voters.

The Huffington Post reports that McCain has paid $175,000 to Lincoln Strategy Group, a political consulting group based in Arizona and run by Republican operative Nathan Sproul, who’s been accused of voter registration fraud in several states — in the form of throwing away Democratic registration forms and suppressing Democratic voter turnout.

HuffPost also reports that the Republican National Committee separately paid Lincoln Strategy another $37,000 to register voters for this election. Sproul, meanwhile, has donated nearly $30,000 to the McCain campaign. He’s also a former leader of the Arizona Republican Party and of the state’s Christian Coalition.

As the Associated Press reports, the court, sitting en banc (all 16 judges), reversed the ruling just last week of its own three-judge panel that had said that the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) does not require states to match all new voters’ data. The Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brummer, had said that matching all such data would be far too difficult to complete before Election Day.

The Ohio ruling is the latest in a series of cases around the country disputing what HAVA requires. Republicans in Florida, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere have maintained that states must verify all new voter registration information against new state databases that were mandated by law. Only if the information matches should the voter’s vote count.

Democrats and voting-rights advocates, on the other hand, have insisted that such a rule is not mandated by HAVA, and would disenfranchise tens of thousands of people in each state, because typos, nick-names, name changes and other technical problems with the data frequently prevent the matching of legitimate voters’ identifying information.

In Florida, for example, some 20,000 voters were prevented or delayed from voting in 2006 because of matching problems.

Given the close race in Ohio, whether all votes are counted could make all the difference.

In recent days, the National Review jumped on the bandwagon, referring to the low-income ACORN workers who register new voters as “lazy crackheads” — supposedly quoting another ACORN worker it deemed a “disgruntled felon/inmate/activist.”

Ever since ACORN announced last week it had signed up 1.3 million new voters, many of whom are expected to lean Democratic, the Republicans have stepped up their attacks. But the nasty tone, twisted facts and outright falsehoods about the group — and Sen. Barack Obama’s connections to it — have become astounding.

True, ACORN workers have been found to have turned in hundreds of unusable, false or even laughable voter registration forms, apparently in an effort to earn some easy money. Then again, out of 1.3 million forms, some are bound to be bad. Though there’s no evidence any of the faulty forms can be used to actually commit voter fraud, media outlets from Fox to CNN to the National Review seem intent on painting the group as trying to steal the presidential election.

The latest claims from the McCain campaign, distributed via flyers at a McCain rally, are that ACORN got $500 million in the recently-approved bailout bill -– a claim that’s patently false. While there was discussion of providing money in the bill to a new agency that helps fund construction of low-income housing, the National Housing Trust Fund — created last summer by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush — that provision didn’t survive, and it had nothing to do with ACORN. (ACORN doesn’t build housing.)

But maybe the strangest revelation of all is the one about McCain’s connections with ACORN: McCain was a keynote speaker at the group’s Immigration Rally in Miami in 2006.

So I guess McCain was for ACORN before he was against it?

Consider the following example from Lake County, IN., which many critics of ACORN have pointed to as a case of voter fraud:

As you can see, canvasser Dain T. submitted the form for a certain Jimmy Johns, who turned out not to be a voter but a sandwich shop.

His supervisor, Latisha Hicks, suspected something fishy, investigated the matter and had Dain T. fired for falsification. According to ACORN, he was then turned over to election officials for prosecution.

This would appear to cut against assertions by some GOP officials that ACORN intentionally, or negligently, filed false registrations.

Sometimes, upon investigation, the supervisor determined that there was no wrongdoing. In the example below, Hicks determined that although the handwriting on several voter registration forms was similar, it was not similar enough to warrant suspicion.

UPDATE 10/15: The folks at ACORN initially gave me these forms without the names blacked out. After consulting their lawyers, they sent me these blacked-out forms and asked me to substitute them in. I obliged.