Investor's Business Daily: Is ACORN stealing the election?
It's a legitimate question to raise now that the FBI has raided the offices of the nonprofit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in Nevada and North Carolina, two states where Obama and John McCain are running neck-and-neck. ACORN has registered bogus voters in both states.
The group's voter-registration fraud is rampant, and authorities plan a nationwide sweep of ACORN offices to collect records.
How rampant? Let us count the ways.
In Cleveland they keep insisting the same people register over, and over, and over.
More "voters" than the entire voting-eligible population of Indianapolis have been registered.
In Missouri they're sorting through piles of sketchy registrations.
The ACORN office in Las Vegas was raided by the FBI and hard drives taken.
In Kansas City where ACORN was actually convicted of this in '06 their at it again.
Alabama and Georgia are having problems as well.
They registered dead guys in Indianapolis.
There is a difference between making sure that every eligible voter that wants to vote can do so, and creating confusion and mayhem in the election process. This is the latter. And what is the reaction from ACORN? Pure unmitigated gall.
ACORN's chief Cleveland organizer, Kris Harsh, said the group can't be expected to catch everything. "None of us have ever achieved perfection," he said.
Amazing. How about this?
A community activist group under fire for fraudulent voter registration defended itself Wednesday, saying it tried in vain to work with officials to get rogue canvassers prosecuted months before Tuesday’s surprise raid on its office by state authorities.
“For six months we have been handing the Board of Elections smoking gun after smoking gun, saying, 'We want you to prosecute these people,’” said Matthew Henderson, regional director of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN. “They sat on them, then staged this raid where they acted as if they didn’t know us.”
That would be amusing were it not so pathetic. And funny. Even funnier is this. Guess what election story the NY Times chose to pursue?
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
Well, no, not exactly.
Elections officials in several states disputed that any voters were illegally removed from rolls. Michigan elections director Chris Thomas said the state removed only people who have died, notified authorities of a move or who were declared unfit to vote, which is well within the parameters of the law. Thomas said only 11,000 voters were removed from Michigan rolls in August — not 33,000, the figure cited in the report.
"There is no illegal purging going on," Thomas told The Associated Press on Thursday.
To conclude this sordid tale, IBD connects a few dots.
What does all this have to do with Obama, besides the fact that he'd be the beneficiary of most, if not all, of these new votes?
For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance work.")
What's more, Obama worked as executive director of ACORN's voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other community organizers on Chicago's South Side, Obama conducted the voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Senate that year.
The foundation of representative democracy is a trusted election process. ACORN is breaking that trust. Their guy is Obama - are they trying to taint the election that he might win?
10/11/08 2220: Check out this smarmy filibuster by an ACORN spokesman, desperately trying to prevent John Fund from informing the public. Hey, even CNN is on the case.
10/12/08 2000: A seven year old? In the same report we find that ACORN's shenanigans can cause problems for legitimate voters. Talk about disenfranchisement!
Roberta Casteel, a nurse, is one of several dozen Nevada voters caught in the web of fake ACORN registrations. Casteel, a registered voter since 1991, was shocked to receive a letter rejecting a voter application she didn't know she'd made.
Authorities said they'd received two voter applications in her name: one as a Democrat and one as an independent. Both cards had her address, date of birth and Social Security number, and were submitted by ACORN workers. Neither signature matched her original one on file.
