Eleven people hired to register potential voters in Miami-Dade County before last year's presidential election were sought Wednesday, accused of falsifying hundreds of voter registration cards.

By late Wednesday, seven were in custody and being held without bond, authorities said.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office issued arrest warrants for each of the 11 suspects, all of whom worked for the local chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now or ACORN.

ACORN came under fire during last year's presidential campaign when Republicans and other conservative groups accused the national organization of committing fraud in its aggressive voter registration efforts in various cities and counties nationwide, including Florida. Criminal charges have been filed in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

But ACORN officials said they had alerted authorities about the alleged illegal activity among some canvassers in Miami-Dade after finding ``numerous discrepancies'' on voter cards collected from the Homestead area.

The arrests are ``further evidence we've been policing our own folks and report people attempting to commit voter registration fraud,'' said ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring. ``This was really some individuals who were trying to defraud their employer.''

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle praised ACORN.

``We've been very aggressive about a lot of these cases,'' she said. ``But we would not have known about these workers unless ACORN brought it to us.

``It's really minor, ineffectual attempts to justify getting paid an hourly basis. It could not have impacted the voting process whatsoever. Nonetheless, we cannot turn a blind eye to this,'' Rundle added.

The Florida Chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association praised Rundle for pursuing the case, saying the alleged crime is ``a serious matter.''

``Hundreds of fraudulent registrations create a clear risk of fraudulent `votes' on Election Day,'' said RNLA Florida Chapter Chair and former Broward County prosecutor Paul Renner in a statement.

The workers, who were paid between $8 and $10 an hour, registered names of nonexistent people -- in one case, actor Paul Newman and singer James Taylor appeared on cards -- or simply filled out several cards for the same real voter, authorities said.

ACORN quality control workers found the discrepancies in the cards turned in by the suspects and contacted authorities in June 2008, authorities said. The group turned in 1,400 cards, of which 888 were found to be fraudulent.

An analyst with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement later reviewed a random group of cards, searching databases to find a record of the voter.

The majority of those sampled for one worker ``contained registrant information that was not able to be matched to a living person,'' one warrant said.

Those arrested are charged with several counts of false swearing in connection with voting or elections and submission of false voter registration information, both third-degree felonies.

ACORN is fighting criminal charges lodged against the organization in Nevada, where prosecutors said workers were paid under an illegal quota system.

In Pittsburgh, several fired ACORN workers have been charged with collecting or submitting bogus voter registration forms. But ACORN, along with ACLU, filed a federal lawsuit in July that challenges the Pennsylvania state law used to prosecute the workers.

Miami Herald staff writer David Ovalle and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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