TALLAHASSEE -- Two suspicious Seminole County voter registration cards became a flash point Wednesday in the Republican effort to suggest the community group ACORN is committing fraud in its historic Florida get-out-the vote efforts.

An ACORN spokesman said the group spotted what appeared to be forged registration cards weeks ago and fired a worker over them. Seminole's election chief, Mike Ertel, said he was still "tremendously concerned," but stopped well short of calling the incident "fraud." The Republican National Committee, though, levelled the accusation and blasted the housing and wage advocacy group in a nationwide conference call with reporters, saying this wasn't an isolated incident.

In Orange County, ACORN staffers submitted multiple, duplicate registrations on behalf of six separate voters this summer. One individual had 21 duplicate applications. Election Supervisor Bill Cowles and his staff protested, noting in a June memo that ACORN had been submitting sloppy forms as well.

ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, changed procedures, disciplined some staffers and improved relations with Orange. ACORN has signed up 135,000 new Florida voters since January in just three counties: Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade.

That's a fifth of all new voters. More than 58 percent are Democrats, who now outnumber Republicans by almost 500,000 voters -- providing Barack Obama a potentially crucial edge in the neck-and-neck race in Florida.

'QUASI CRIMINAL?'

ACORN's voter-registration drives have come under fire from Republicans for being sloppy and allegedly fraudulent in North Carolina, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico and Colorado, said Republican National Committee chief legal counsel Scott Cairncross.

Cairncross noted that ACORN in Washington state had to file an agreement with prosecutors to improve procedures after seven workers were charged with criminal voter-registration fraud.

''This organization is not new to this game. They are a quasi-criminal Democrat-affiliated organization that harms the elections process,'' Cairncross said.

ACORN's Florida coordinator, Brian Kettenring, said the organization is non-partisan. He dismissed the attacks saying the Republicans are trying to ``reduce the size of the electorate.''

''What's criminal is the way the McCain campaign is drumming up lies and misrepresentation to try to suppress minority voter participation,'' Kettenring said. ``It's clear they are willing to use mistruths and exaggerations to try to create an atmosphere of chaos.''

Plus, he said, voter-registration problems don't equal vote fraud, such as someone showing up to the polls with a false I.D.

However, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, pointed out that unregistered voters could be signed up without their knowledge and then have absentee ballots fraudulently cast on their behalf in rare cases. Browning said he had a good working relationship with ACORN when he was Pasco County's elections chief until 2006.

ACORN is a massive nationwide association that made its presence felt in the 2004 elections when it signed up 212,000 people to vote in Florida, where it now has 15,000 members.

Republicans said ACORN wasn't just working on the successful ballot initiative boosting the minimum wage in Florida -- it wanted to help Democrat John Kerry. Kerry lost by about 381,000 votes. Since that election, ACORN says it has signed up 382,000 voters in Florida.

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