Washington (CNSNews.com) – Too many absentee ballots, litigation against voter identification laws, and actions by a liberal community-organizer group have disenfranchised some voters while potentially allowing illegal votes to be cast, election lawyers claimed Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C.
 
In Minnesota -- where the Senate race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken likely will not be decided until the summer – at least 12,000 votes were not counted, said Mark Braden, an election lawyer who has been involved in the case for the last several months.
 
Most of those 12,000 votes were absentee ballots, and most were rural voters.
 
“There is a push in Minnesota to get so many people in the mail process,” Braden, former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, said during an election law panel at CPAC.
 
Because of local government resources there, cities rejected less than 1 percent of absentee ballots, while rural areas rejected more than 10 percent, Braden said.
 
“This is a clear violation of the equal protection clause,” Braden said. “More mail-in votes results in many disenfranchised voters.”
 
The Minnesota Senate race is likely headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But beyond that single state, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) also poses a threat to clean elections, said Heather Heidelbaugh, vice president of the Republican National Lawyers Association, which brought suit against ACORN in Pennsylvania. 

Heidelbaugh said ACORN will probably get money to help conduct the 2010 Census.
 
“The one thing worse than having Al Franken in the Senate is to have ACORN conducting the Census,” Heidelbaugh said during the CPAC panel.
 
Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who supervised that state’s election system, called the effort to move the Census under control of the White House an indicator that “team Obama has its sights set on the greatest accumulation of power we have ever witnessed.”
 
President Barack Obama’s support for ending the secret ballot in union elections through passage of "card check" legislation would work to “chip away at the moral grasp of the secret ballot” in other areas, Blackwell said. Blackwell also said he thinks the administration wants to regulate talk radio and thus silence opposing viewpoints.
 
The Obama administration might also try to pack the courts with judges that would oppose voter ID laws, while Democrats in Congress are already calling for same-day voter registration nationally, a system Blackwell thinks is open to fraud.
 
Blackwell predicted that Obama also would push for amnesty for illegal immigrants, who have been involved in election fraud cases in the past.
 
“Individually, these are dangerous,” Blackwell said. “Taken collectively, it is the game plan of the left and the Obama administration.”
 
The left has run a consistent legal assault against voter-verification at the state level, said Hans Von Spakovsky, a former election lawyer for the Department of Justice and a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
 
The U.S Supreme Court upheld a voter ID law in Indiana. However, liberal organizations sued the state of Arizona for requiring proof of citizenship for voters and sued Georgia for checking voter registration forms against Social Security numbers to make sure a voter is still alive and is a citizen.
 
“Since 2000, liberal organizations have been pouring money into litigation all over the country,” said Von Spakovsky. “All of the lawsuits are aimed at destroying the ability of states to verify information on voter registration forms. All the laws survive, but unfortunately at great expense. It’s a scorched earth process, to keep litigating until states won’t want the expense.”