Anne Hathaway may be sweetness and all-American good looks on the surface, but what do we really know about her? How would Americans feel if they knew that she palled around with felons? She says Raffaello Follieri was just a guy from the apartment on Fifth Avenue that she shared with him, but they were totally doing it as he pulled off a crazy scam involving the Vatican. When he was convicted of fraud and money laundering, Hathaway severed ties. But she's still connected to a sleazy voter registration syndicate that now stands accused of filing false registrations in New York, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida. That's right—Anne Hathaway's in the pocket of Rock the Vote. This "organization representing the intersection of young people, politics and popular culture" was started in 1992 by some sleazy Hollywood entertainment industry types and they'd been trying to swing elections ever since with nihilistic "grunge music" and godless celebrities. The group lets would- be election defrauders print out unlimited voter registration forms they access from their "Xboxes" and "iPhones." Then Rock the Vote helpfully sends all the forms to the wrong place and no one is registered. Democracy! [Update: Rock the Vote says the New York Board of Elections screwed up! No Times correction yet!] Anne Hathaway got tied up in this modern-day Tammany Hall, of course:

About 10 days ago, when the actress Anne Hathaway was recording a public service announcement for Rock the Vote, she told Ms. Smith that she had used the group's on-line form but didn't find her name on the rolls. In verifying her registration – Ms. Hathaway's voter identification number was ultimately tracked down - Ms. Smith said she learned that about 40,000 applications had not been processed.

She is so trusting and naive, that one. And so adorable! VOTE-ROCKING UPDATE: Rock the Vote says New York gave them the correct addresses for mailing in voter registrations. We're... not sure how accurate that is? The New York State board of elections seems to have told them to tell voters to mail the forms to the main State Board of Elections, and not local precinct boards. Some of the registrations should still count, but this explains the massive delays in processing the forms. The New York State Board of Elections doesn't care about Vote-Rocking people. The problem, of course, is the decentralized and massively complicated opt-in voting system of the United States as a whole. They'd like a correction from the Times, but the Times hasn't updated anything and we're not sure they have anything to correct. They do note in a City Room entry, today:

Ms. Smith said that Rock the Vote printed the state board's address on its application because it was on a list of central addresses for each state provided by the federal Elections Assistance Commission, and because her group got written confirmation twice from New York State officials that they could receive the applications in Albany. All the groups doing registration drives, including Rock the Vote, may have lost time by following the federal instructions.

So. The Feds told Rock the Vote to ask NY State which gave them an incorrect address, twice. Voting in America is a big embarrassing mess, again, as usual.