Guilty plea over phony voter forms

A man charged last summer in a scheme to submit phony voter registration forms pleaded guilty Thursday in King County Superior Court, a spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office said.

Ryan Olson of Needles, Calif., was sentenced to 30 days of detention on a felony charge of providing false information on voter forms, although his case will be reviewed to allow for possible electronic monitoring in his home, the spokesman said.

Olson was one of seven workers for a 2006 voter-registration drive conducted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, who were indicted in July on charges that they made up names of voters, forged signatures and turned in bogus registrations to elections officials in Seattle.

No votes were cast based on the more than 1,760 fraudulent registrations submitted in October 2006, in part because they were turned in after the deadline for the November election.

The workers were not trying to commit election fraud but merely to make it easier to perform their temporary, low-wage jobs, prosecutors said. Instead of signing up would-be voters, they gathered at the downtown Seattle library and confected voter identities from names in telephone directories, newspaper articles and baby-name books.

Elections workers became suspicious when they noticed similarities in the signatures on the registrations, which led to the investigation.

Two other ACORN workers -- Tina Johnson of Tacoma and Jayson Woods of Elkridge, Md. -- have pleaded guilty and await sentencing. The cases against the other defendants are pending.