PolitiFact weighs in on Marco Rubio’s claim that Charlie Crist worked with ACORN to restore voting rights for felons. An excerpt:
So we went to Stephanie Porta, ACORN’s former Florida director. Porta said the Florida offices have been closed since December 2009.
Porta laughed when she heard Rubio’s claim. (She knows that ACORN is a pejorative in most Republican circles).
“We’ve always been supportive of felon rights,” Porta said. “We help people get their rights restored. But we never worked with the Crist campaign or Crist to make it happen.”
“We were just as shocked as everybody else that he did it,” Porta said, noting that she ultimately hoped Crist would have gone further.
In their first debate, Rubio tried to nick Crist’s conservative credentials by claiming Crist worked with the beleaguered social advocacy group ACORN on a plan to restore felon voter rights in Florida. But we found no evidence that he did work with ACORN on felon voter rights and the Rubio campaign provided none itself. In fact, ACORN’s top Florida executive said the group had nothing to do Crist’s plan and was surprised he was considering it at all. We rate Rubio’s claim False.
