ACORN Fraud Charges Escalate
Although linking with some approval to a piece written by Outside the Beltway’s James Joyner yesterday, I think that it is becoming increasingly difficult to say that ACORN is mostly doing good work, and keeping it within the law. CNN reported today, for instance, that ACORN faked “thousand of voters registration forms.” As if that’s not enough, the New York Post pointed out that some individuals have ‘registered’ dozens of times, one specific individual even 72 times and officials in Misouri are complaining that ACORN is trying to commit fraud there as well.
To make matters worse with regards to ACORN it seems that Barack Obama once again lied about his ties to radical activists.
The Cleveland Leader noted that the Obama campaign lied at least two times on its website about Obama’s ties to ACORN. On the website the campaign said that Obama “was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.”
The fact of the matter is, however, that Obama did work for them. It took the Cleveland Leader some digging, but they found articles about Obama’s work for ACORN which had all been deleted from the organizations and magazines that ran them years ago. These articles find that Obama was invited to run this organization’s “leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year.” As a result, the author of one specific article, Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN Leader, wrote “many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”
Miraculously, this article was erased later when Obama ran for president. Additionally, Foulkes “makes it clear that Obama’s post-law school organizing of ‘Project VOTE’ in 1992 was undertaken in direct partnership with ACORN. The tie between Project VOTE and ACORN is also something that Obama and others have attempted to disprove in recent weeks as ACORN has come under fire for allegations of voter registration fraud.”
On the same day that the Cleveland Leader exposed Obama lies (or ‘distortions’ as some would probably prefer to call them) and his close relationship with ACORN and similar groups, CNN ran another piece highly critical of Obama. CNN’s Drew Griffin filed a piece in which he explains to viewers how ACORN is committing voter fraud and how Obama “is closely tied to the group.” Griffin found that of the 5,000 application forms submitted by ACORN 50% were ‘bad,’ such as registered “to a dead person.” And forms signed by the same people under different names, albeit clearly signed by the same person.
Griffin took one of the forms and tried to find out whether the person in whose name it was submitted actually existed. The form was for a man called Jimmy Johns. Instead of finding this person, he ended up at a fastfood restaurant with that name. He went in and was told that no one by that name lived there.
As Griffin noted, the Obama campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN.
It now seems that the ties between Obama and ACORN go much further than this donation. More will undoubtedly follow in the coming days and weeks.
I think this article is completely overreacting. Voter registration fraud is not the same thing as vote fraud. Two important points: ACORN is required by law to submit every registration card their workers turn in. Whether the cards are filled out incompetently or maliciously (and I think it’s fair to say that someone reregistering himself multiple times is simply incompetent), ACORN is not allowed to throw away cards they think are bogus!Second, how does a phony registration, assuming the state doesn’t catch it, turn into a phony vote on anything like the scale required to steal an election? It’s absurd. The same person is going to go vote multiple time? Pollworkers may trend older but they aren’t blind. (No offense to any blind pollworkers out there.) A carefully orchestrated army of phony voters going from polling place to polling place, with multiple sets of fake IDs? Give me a break, or catch them in the act.ACORN is a biennial bugbear for Republicans. Every election season they start howling about fraudulent registrations, which are an almost unavoidable side effect of registration drives, and every time there’s no evidence of actual vote fraud. Evidence, please.
adam g, apparently you are unaware of the fact that you can’t prove a negative. It’s infuriating every time I hear a Democrat saying that there’s no evidence of voter fraud (actually there is, but even leaving that aside), because even the possibility of fraud destroys the integrity of an election. It’s quite possible that fraud occurs and is not caught, especially if…wait for it….the election supervisory officials say that it’s not necessary to look for it because it doesn’t happen!
That’s not to mention that many places don’t require any ID at all to vote, and absentee and mail in voting allow people to vote without any visual observation of the person, and let’s not forget early voting which means that there’s absolutely no requirement that the person who might vote twice would be seen by the same polling officials since voting takes place over an extended time period.
And tell me why it is that ACORN would spend millions of dollars (some of which are taxpayer dollars, by the way, and others are Obama campaign dollars to pay for their ‘nonpartisan’ services) to register people if not to serve as placeholders for fraudulent votes? Oh, yeah, I forgot, they’re doing it as a charitable mission to make sure that no one is disenfranchised by their own frikkin laziness and apathy. Curiously, too, ACORN seems to care a WHOLE lot about making sure everyone in certain states votes, while other states, not so much.
This is why registered Independents will decide the winner between Obama & McCain. Its a lesser of two evils vote in the end, with both sides dug in with a partisan defense of thier man. One can discredit FOX News as biased, but living in this world of open access to communication, this story has 1140 or more version and in the end, Obama has ties he can not shake off or hide! Unlike either party, I am still waiting on the facts to cast my vote, the vote of a registered independent!
MIB
Don’t forget that not only did the Obam Campagn give $800,000 to Acorn, they “Mistakenly Misrepresented” Their Work To The FEC:
“Obama’s Campaign “Paid More Than $800,000″ To ACORN For Get-Out-The Vote Efforts; The Campaign Originally “Misrepresented” The Group’s Work To The FEC. “U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat’s campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports. An Obama spokesman said Federal Election Commission reports would be amended to show Citizens Services Inc. — a subsidiary of ACORN — worked in ‘get-out-the-vote’ projects, instead of activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary.” (David M. Brown, “Obama To Amend Report On $800,000 In Spending,” Pittsburgh Tribune Review, 8/22/08) ”
Here is the source:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/rnc-obamas-acorn-tree/story.aspx?guid=%7B392B81C5-251B-4796-9EB5-9DF2BB22C92F%7D&dist=hppr