Update 7/27 10:05am Eastern. Here’s the PDF of the settlement agreement (via David Postman):

a. ACORN agrees that submission of registrations that have been fraudulently collected by an ACORN employee and not reviewed pursuant to the quality control procedures, or willfully turning in fraudulent cards, may constitute grounds for criminal prosecution of ACORN as a corporate entity unless such cards have been segregated by ACORN pursuant to the requirements of section 7 of this agreement.

b. ACORN agrees that violations of the terms of this agreement may be used as evidence in the State of Washington in future criminal prosecutions against ACORN employees, ACORN management, or ACORN as a corporate entity.

Guess which left-wing group is at the center of the worst case of voter-registration fraud in Washington state history? Yep, you guessed it: ACORN. The same ACORN tied to massive voter fraud in Missouri. And Ohio. And 12 other states. Here’s the Washington state scoop via Seattle’s KOMO TV: “King County prosecutors filed felony charges Thursday against seven people in what a top official described as the worst case of voter-registration fraud in state history, while the organization they worked for agreed to keep a better eye on its employees and pay $25,000 to defray costs of the investigation. The seven submitted about 1,800 registration cards last fall on behalf of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which had hired them at $8 an hour to sign people up to vote, according to charging documents filed in Superior Court.”

Prosecutors didn’t sugercoat the fraud: “This was an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls of King County,” said Dan Satterberg, the interim King County prosecutor. But officials tried to give ACORN some benefit of the doubt, noting that the defendants were motivated by financial gain rather than intentions of sabotaging the election. However:

….in interviews with King County Sheriff’s Detective Chris Johnson, several of the defendants – while freely admitting they forged the forms – insisted that they had been told ACORN would shut down their office in Tacoma if they didn’t improve their numbers, Johnson wrote in a probable cause statement.

One, Ryan Olson, said another worker in the office told him “do what you have to do” to turn in more cards.

ACORN’s oversight of the workers was virtually nonexistent – to the extent that civil charges could have been warranted, Satterberg said.

In a settlement agreement announced Thursday, ACORN, which cooperated with the investigation, agreed to pay $25,000 and to make improvements in its management, training and oversight of suspect voter registrations throughout the state.

The Seattle Times adds that the announcement of criminal charges came after the King County Canvassing Board revoked 1,762 allegedly fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN employees.

According to prosecutors, six ACORN workers “had admitted filling out registration forms with names they found in phone books last October. The canvassers filled out the forms while sitting around a table at the downtown Seattle Public Library.”

You’ll love some of the names they used, via Sound Politics:

Tom Tancredo

Dennis Hastert

Alcee Hastings

John McKay

Leon Spinks

Frekkie Magoal

Fruto Boy Crispila

Google “Fruto Boy Crispila.” You’ll see the listing in the cached entry on the King County voter rolls (the PDF file is gone, but you can see the line item):

ACORN and voter fraud: Perfect together.

Flashback from November 2006, WSJ:

Operating in at least 38 states (as well as Canada and Mexico), Acorn pushes a highly partisan agenda, and its organizers are best understood as shock troops for the AFL-CIO and even the Democratic Party. As part of the Fannie Mae reform bill, House Democrats pushed an “affordable housing trust fund” designed to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits to subsidize Acorn, among other groups. A version of this trust fund actually passed the Republican House and will surely be on the agenda again next year.

Acorn and its affiliates have pulled some real stunts in recent years. In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn’s practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.

“You have to wonder what’s the point of that, if not to overwhelm the system and get phony registrations on the voter rolls,” says Thor Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights, who also testified at the hearing. “These were Democratic officials saying that they felt their election system in Ohio was under assault by these kinds of efforts to game the system.”

Given this history, it’s not surprising that Acorn is so hostile to voter identification laws and other efforts to ensure fairness and accuracy at the polls. In Missouri last month, the state Supreme Court held that a photo ID requirement to vote was overly burdensome and a violation of the state constitution. Acorn was behind the original suit challenging the statute, and it has brought similar challenges in several other states, including Ohio.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that blacks today are almost twice as likely as they were in 2004 to say they have little or no confidence in the voting system. Such a finding would seem like a powerful argument for voter ID laws, which consistently poll well among people of all races and incomes and would increase confidence in the voting process. Of course, voter ID laws would also cut down on fraud, which, judging from the latest indictments, would put a real crimp in Acorn’s style.

Isn’t it time to cut off government grants and taxpayer subsidies to ACORN once and for all?

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Commenter Zorro points out that John Edwards’ poverty tour was joined at ACORN’s hip. Yes, indeed it was. Here’s video:

Fraudulent birds of a feather flock together.