With just 21 days left until an election in which every vote will count, a Colorado news team has uncovered voter registration fraud that could cause chaos on Election Day for hundreds, possibly thousands of Colorado voters.

Most of the fraud has come from registration drives…

Some of the registration drive workers earn $2 per application or about $10 an hour. One woman admitted to forging three people’s names on about 40 voter registration applications. Kym Cason says she was helping her boyfriend earn more money from a get-out-the-vote organization called ACORN or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN works with low or moderate-income families on housing issues. Cason said her extra registrations earned her boyfriend $50.

Prosecutors in Columbus have filed criminal charges against an Acorn registrar, saying that he filed a false registration form and forged a signature. Officials for the group say they fired the worker and instituted a quality checking system before the prosecutors acted.

Nevertheless, an examination of county registration records shows that the groups have added thousands of new Democrats to the rolls and have far outnumbered new registrations in Republican areas. In a 300-square-block area east of the courthouse in downtown Columbus that voted nine to one against Mr. Bush in 2000, for instance, 3,000 new voters have registered this year. That is three times as many as in each of the last two presidential election years. The number of registered voters in the area is up 18 percent since January.

By comparison, in a prosperous area north of downtown with a similar number of voters who are overwhelmingly Republican, just 1,100 new voters have been added this year, increasing registration rolls by 7 percent.