Steven Mahoney touted himself as an expert in immigration affairs and ran Mahoney and Associates in Kent, which advised immigrants on how to stay in the U.S. He pleaded guilty in April, acknowledging that between 1998 and 2007 he filed as many as 99 false immigration documents and was paid between $1,000 and $4,000 for each.

In addition to false claims of homosexuality, he advised some clients to claim they could be tortured due to their religious practices or political views.

His ex-wife, Helen Mahoney, was sentenced to six months. Both are naturalized U.S. citizens from Russia.

It is illegal for gay and lesbian couples to marry in New York, though the state recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. But Nelson used a food stamp card for an ID – it listed the gender as “F” – and wore a dress to City Hall, the New York Post reports.

Nelson is transgendered and Stenson does not identify himself as gay. But as they walked out of City Hall together after the ceremony was performed, Stenson said, “I think we just made history.”

Their marriage might be the first official same-sex marriage in New York State – though it might not stay on the books long.

The City Clerk’s office said that the marriage is not legal and they are considering next steps. The office is now requiring a birth certificate as proof of identification for marrriages.

Evan Wolfson, head of Freedom to Marry, told the Post that this is “one more illustration of why the New York Senate needs to move quickly to pass the marriage bill and end this discrimination in New York.”

Note: OK, readers – I changed the wording a bit. What do you think?

A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of recent raids on ACORN offices in several states for any evidence of a coordinated national scam.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, says it has registered 1.3 million young people, minorities and poor and working-class voters – most of whom tend to be Democrats.

Republican accusations about the group were raised during Wednesday’s presidential debate between Democrat Barack Obama and GOP candidate John McCain.

Some ACORN employees have been accused of submitting false voter registration forms – including some signed `Mickey Mouse’ or other fictitious characters.

Those voter registration cards have become the focus of fraud investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least five other states. Election officials in Ohio and North Carolina also recently questioned the group’s voter forms.

ACORN has said the “vast majority” of its workers are conscientious, but some might have turned in duplicate applications or provided fake information to pad their pay. Workers caught submitting false information have been fired, ACORN officials say.

ACORN says laws in a number of states require it to submit all registration cards it collects even dubious ones, so its workers segregate applications with missing, suspicious or false information and flag them so state election officials can quickly check them further.

The openly gay Hatch, 47, was sentenced to four years and three months in prison after his 2006 conviction for tax evasion in federal court in Providence. He is scheduled to be released in October 2009.

Hatch’s appeal was already denied by a federal appeals court in Boston and was among more than a thousand rejected last week by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court did not explain its reasoning.

“He’s disappointed with the decision,” Hatch’s attorney, Michael Minns, said Wednesday. “He’s been worried about his family and taking care of them the entire time.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Rhode Island, which prosecuted Hatch, did not comment Wednesday.

Hatch, of Newport, argued in his appeal that a judge improperly barred him from raising allegations of cheating during the taping of the hit CBS show and from explaining why he believed the producers would pay his taxes for him.

During the trial, Minns told U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres outside the jury’s presence that Hatch had caught show employees smuggling food to other contestants during taping in Borneo in 2000. He said a producer promised him his taxes would be paid if he kept quiet and went on to win the competition, a claim CBS has strongly denied.

Besides his “Survivor” winnings, Hatch also was convicted of evading taxes on $327,000 he earned as co-host of a Boston radio show and $28,000 in rent on property he owed.

He was acquitted of seven bank, mail and wire fraud charges that related to his charity, Horizon Bound, an outdoors program he planned to open for troubled youth.

Oregon counts ballots no matter what happens to the voter. So does Florida. But in South Dakota, if you die before the election, so does your vote.

Increasingly popular mail-in ballots mean voters can now choose candidates up to 60 days before an election, raising new questions about an age-old phenomenon normally associated with chicanery in places like Chicago: What should be done with the ballots of the recently dead?

Laws in at least a dozen states are evenly split between tallying and dumping the votes. No one keeps records on how often such deaths occur.

Yet in this year’s contentious campaign, the right of every American to a counted ballot has become a rallying cry – even if the voter dies before the tallying starts.

Take the case of Florence Steen, an ailing 88-year-old grandmother born before women had the right to vote. One of her last wishes was to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. She wanted to be part of history, said her daughter Kathy Krause.

Steen was confined to a hospice bed in Rapid City, S.D., when she was brought an absentee ballot weeks before the June 3 primary. She studied it a long time, then marked her choice with such determination her daughter feared she would poke through the paper.

Steen died on Mother’s Day. With a heavy heart, her daughter took the ballot and dropped it in a mailbox. “In my mind, her vote counted,” Krause said. “My mother believed she had voted for a woman to be president.”

But the women down at the county courthouse told Krause the ballot had to be tossed because state law declared a voter must be alive on Election Day.

So Krause passed that word to the Clinton campaign. And Clinton drew great applause when she told the story in her concession speech four days after the South Dakota primary.

“It’s just a goofy law, and it needs to be changed,” said Krause, who plans to lobby state legislators to reverse that statute just as soon as her grief eases.

“What about the soldiers in Iraq? What if they vote and they’re killed in action, God forbid? Should we take away their vote because they died for their country?”

There are no military standards governing voting by soldiers. Rather, their mailed-in ballots are counted at the individual election districts where they are registered to vote. But like civilian votes, no one keeps track of whether the ballots of soldiers are thrown out because they died after casting them.

“No one can tell you that,” said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, head of the Overseas Voting Foundation in Munich. “Every single election jurisdiction can do it the way it wants. And there are more than 7,000 of them.”

Thirty-one states allow some form of early voting.

Ballots cast by the dead are usually the focus of fraud allegations, as happened in Washington’s extremely tight 2004 gubernatorial race, decided by a margin of 129 votes out of 3 million cast. More than a dozen ballots were linked to dead people.

But some advocates say legitimate, mail-in votes from people who die before Election Day should be counted, particularly in rural elections, where races can hang on a handful of votes.

“In Montana, there have been several legislative seats decided by one, two, three votes,” said Tim Storey of the National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization that recently looked at 12 mostly Western states and found that half have no rules governing ballots of the deceased.

Those remaining states – Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota and Utah – demand that such ballots be rejected, leaving Montana and Oregon as the only states that count them.

South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson said he doesn’t understand why a dead person’s vote should be counted.

“In my mind, it’s clear,” Nelson said. “You have to be a qualified voter on Election Day. I don’t know how someone can say you’re a qualified voter if you’re deceased.”

Pam Smith, director of the advocacy group Verified Voting, disagrees: “By definition, the day you cast a ballot is Election Day. That’s it.”

Mail-in ballots arrived in record numbers during this year’s protracted primary season.

In California’s San Diego County, for example, 45 percent of the presidential vote arrived by mail. Similar numbers surfaced across the country. Election experts have predicted that as many as 25 percent of voters will vote by mail in November.

Dan Seligson, an editor at electionline.org, a voter watchdog organization, said ballots from the recently deceased could affect the contentious presidential showdown between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

“It could be a great contribution to any legal challenge,” he said. “That’s what happened in 2000, when we had this perfect storm of questions about ballot counts, ballot designs, and dead voters.”