ACORN/VOTER FRAUD

[crazybabyborg]

The ACORN/Obama Voter Registration "Thug Thizzle"
Michelle Malkin
Wed Oct 8, 3:00 AM ET
 


Systemic corruption of our election process continues. Barack Obama and his old friends at ACORN and Project Vote are leading the way. This radical revolution is taking place in your backyard. And as I've reported before, this voter-fraud racket is on your dime.

On Monday, the two liberal groups announced the wrap-up of a 21-state voter registration drive targeting low-income people and minorities in battleground states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

What's wrong with that? For starters, these two groups are militant partisan outfits purporting to engage in nonpartisan civic activity. And their campaign comes amid an avalanche of fresh voter-fraud allegations involving ACORN in many of those same key states.

On Tuesday, Nevada state officials raided ACORN's Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names.

ACORN, which receives 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers to pursue an aggressive welfare-state agenda, has already helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. The rest of their funding comes from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance.

Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, was founded by left-wing lawyer Sandy Newman to register voters in welfare offices and unemployment lines with the explicit goal of turning back the Reagan revolution.

The two groups are inextricably linked — and at their nexus is Barack Obama.
In 1992, Newman hired Obama to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The Illinois drive's motto: "It's a Power Thing."

As previously noted in this column ("The ACORN Obama Knows," June 25, 2008), Obama also trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN's PAC endorsed his primary bid with full backing and muscle.

Despite his adamant denials of any association with the group (his Fight the Smears website now claims "Barack Obama never organized with ACORN"), Obama's political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda.

The Obama campaign's "Vote for Change" registration drive, running parallel to ACORN/Project Vote, is an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama's big-government vision. "Our volume," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe bragged of the voter-registration program, "will be enormous."

Quantity over quality. It's the ACORN way.

In addition to the Las Vegas raid, fraud allegations keep piling up:

— Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected a large portion of the 5,000 registration forms ACORN turned in after conducting registration drives in the area all summer. Some vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from telephone books and forged signatures. According to local reports, "large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style" and "apparently the organization's canvassers broke rules to meet ACORN-set voter registration quotas to get paid." The fake registrants included dead people and underage kids.
On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 voter applications were no good — tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen.

— Last month, Milwaukee, Wis., officials discovered at least seven felons employed as voter registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter registration cards. The state GOP accused ACORN of attempting to enroll dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to voter rolls. Fraud has plagued ACORN's Milwaukee chapter since the last election cycle.

— In Florida, in Orange County alone, ACORN workers turned in multiple copycat forms for six separate voters over the summer. According to the Miami Herald, "One individual had 21 duplicate applications."
Election officials had flagged ACORN's negligent practices several months ago, but it may be too late: In Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, ACORN has signed up 135,000 new voters, nearly 60 percent of them registered as Democrats that constitute a fifth of all new voters in that region.

— In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people received free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling prospects to the polls. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who told her ACORN "told her who to vote for if she wanted a 'better life,' and told her not to worry about jury duty (one of the reasons this homeless woman didn't want to register) because the government probably wouldn't be able to track her down. She was registering with a temporary address."
Holliday interviewed another homeless man targeted by the registration drive who exulted that he was voting for Obama because "I want him to do his thang. You know, do his thug thizzle."

"Thug thizzle" is street slang for performing your trademark move. Obama and ACORN have practiced their thug thizzle together for years: organizing an ever-expanding community of ineligible and marginal voters to expand the Democratic power base. Rules be damned.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20081008/cm_uc_crmmax/op_197668

[WhiskeyGirl]

Inquiry finds evidence of fraud in election

Cast ballots outnumber voters by 4,609

By GREG J. BOROWSKI
gborowski@journalsentinel.com

Investigators said Tuesday they found clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person.

The newspaper found at least 278 felons who voted statewide, though only a partial review could be completed because of a state law that bars public access to birthdates of voters.

Tracking illegal votes
The fraud investigation has focused on the more than 70,000 people who registered to vote on election day, not the other 200,000-plus voters. That is because registration cards provide a paper trail, which officials said would be stronger in court than computerized records.

It is unclear what identification these 100-plus people provided at the polls to register. State law allows utility bills and leases to be used or for one voter to vouch for another.

Tuesday's announcement could breathe new life into the Republican-backed photo ID debate, which did not survive a veto from Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and might instead eventually go to voters as a proposed constitutional amendment.

A photo ID requirement might have caught some of the problems highlighted in Tuesday's preliminary report. It notes cases of people voting in the name of a dead person or as someone else. Investigators located some people listed as voting who said they did not vote.

In other cases, according to Tuesday's report, people "registered and voted with identities and addresses that cannot in any way be linked to a real person."

"I don't think many people, if they know there are real consequences for voting twice, and that there have been prosecutions for voting twice, are going to do it because the risk of being caught and the penalty far outweighs the advantage of casting one extra vote," Doyle said.

I think the chances of getting caught are somewhere between "0" and none.  So, what do fraud voters have to lose? 

Who is going to identify them if they go from polling place to polling place voting?  Maybe 100 or more time?  Where is the evidence?

Politicians will probably say "there is no evidence".

Showing an ID card protects everyone, imho.  Using an ID card is part of life.  Voting is important. 

I think there is mass voter fraud going on and that it will be widespread during the election in November. 

It cheapens everyone's vote when people engage in fraud.

[WhiskeyGirl]

Only in Wisconsin 

Barrett Supports Absentee Ballots Without ID

By Nick Iannelli and Jay Sorgi

Story Updated: Oct 8, 2008

Milwaukee's Mayor Tom Barrett in support of some controversial voting initiatives for the upcoming Presidential election.

Barrett spoke at a news conference where he encouraged people to vote early with absentee ballots, even if the voters have no form of ID.

The city's election director Sue Edman spoke with the mayor. They say it will make it easier for people to cast their ballots.

"If you do not have a Wisconsin driver's license, if you do not have a state ID or you do not have a social security number, you are still allowed to vote," said Edman.

But some like Wisconsin's Republican Party think the initiative will make it easier to commit voter fraud.

"People who have no form of identification, don't have the last four digits of the social security number cannot just put a ballot into the box," states Reince Priebus of the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

http://www.620wtmj.com/news/local/30618639.html

How is it possible that in this day and age, that anyone who is legal to vote doesn't have a drivers license, state ID, or Social Security Number?

Help me understand...

[WhiskeyGirl]

Vote Fraud 2008: The Coming Disaster?

Monday, October 6, 2008 7:39 PM

By: Dave Eberhart  Article Font Size   
 
With Election Day fast approaching, Republicans inside the Beltway and across the nation are bracing for massive vote-fraud allegations and a tangle of legal disputes in key swing states.

Electoral officials may be facing a “perfect storm” that could throw the election outcome into a legal morass. One of their biggest headaches: the swelling ranks of voters with new addresses because of recent foreclosure proceedings.

(snip)

The prospect of a tsunami of voters with outdated addresses showing up at polling places has election officials worried.

(snip)

Also, officials’ ability to detect fraudulent absentee ballots from those who recently moved has never been tested as it will be this November. Several other factors raise the specter of massive balloting snafus and widespread allegations of voter fraud:

(snip)

Republican Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, who are running the McCain-Palin 2008 Honest and Open Election Committee, say that some polling places are kept open longer on Election Day to favor one candidate intentionally over another.

Danforth and Rudman also point out that voter registrations in Ohio in the last election exceeded the number of voting-age people in four counties. They ask whether that could happen again.

In Nevada, nearly 1,000 felons were registered illegally in 2004.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee election officials recently turned in 32 more voter registration workers to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, bringing the total cases pending to 39.

The Ohio secretary of state is, in effect, disenfranchising voters who relied on printed applications for absentee ballots, claiming they shouldn’t get a ballot because all of the appropriate boxes were not checked. “So we are concerned that a lot of people who want to vote absentee in Ohio are not going to be able to do so,” Danforth said.

There is a growing shortage of volunteer poll workers as that group ages: In March 2002, an unprecedented number of poll workers didn’t report for work in Los Angeles County. Almost 125 precincts opened late, and one didn’t open at all.

(snip)

A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 40 percent of Americans believe there is either significant vote fraud or active suppression of people who want to vote.

At a time of heightened security and mundane rules that require citizens to show ID to travel and even rent a video, only half the states require some form of documentation to vote.

Another major concern this year is provisional balloting, which allows voters not on the rolls to complete a ballot that will later count if they turn out to be eligible to vote.

Although close to 2 million provisional ballots were cast in the 2004 presidential election, several states have since clarified how the provisional ballots work, and have begun to publicize their availability.

Fund, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s Web site and the paper’s daily “Political Diary” and author of the recently revised and updated book, "Stealing Elections," tells Newsmax that “there will be many more than 2 million provisional ballots this year, driven in part by hordes of new voters just showing up and demanding one.”

[Editor’s Note: Get John Fund’s book "Stealing Elections." Go here now.]

He warns: “A tug of war over provisional ballots may be inevitable in key states where the margin of victory is no greater than the number of provisional ballots cast. Both campaigns would once again send squadrons of lawyers to any closely contested state to watch and argue as every single provisional ballot in the state is reviewed and a determination is made as to whether it should be counted. Results could once again be delayed for weeks after Election Day.”

(snip)

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/election_voter_fraud/2008/10/06/137898.html

[crazybabyborg]

Only in Wisconsin 

Barrett Supports Absentee Ballots Without ID

By Nick Iannelli and Jay Sorgi

Story Updated: Oct 8, 2008

Milwaukee's Mayor Tom Barrett in support of some controversial voting initiatives for the upcoming Presidential election.

Barrett spoke at a news conference where he encouraged people to vote early with absentee ballots, even if the voters have no form of ID.

The city's election director Sue Edman spoke with the mayor. They say it will make it easier for people to cast their ballots.

"If you do not have a Wisconsin driver's license, if you do not have a state ID or you do not have a social security number, you are still allowed to vote," said Edman.

But some like Wisconsin's Republican Party think the initiative will make it easier to commit voter fraud.

"People who have no form of identification, don't have the last four digits of the social security number cannot just put a ballot into the box," states Reince Priebus of the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

http://www.620wtmj.com/news/local/30618639.html

How is it possible that in this day and age, that anyone who is legal to vote doesn't have a drivers license, state ID, or Social Security Number?

Help me understand...

No. no, Whiskeygirl. You're being way too logical. I have another question. How can you establish that you are even a resident of the state you're registering to vote in, without those documents?

Oh! I forgot. The only requirement is intent to vote for Obama. And do it often!

[Slogger]

Voter fraud is fraud, and theft by deception of our RIGHT to have a FAIR ELECTION.

Voter fraud is disgusting.

Voter fraud is being condoned and assisted.

Follow the trail to the top!

[crazybabyborg]

Senator Ensign (Nevada-R) has called to cut all Federal Funds to Acorn.

DUH! YA THINK??? 

There's a little money we could save our taxpayers!

[nonesuche]

Amen! I know daughter discovered Obama's campaign is willing to 'pay' for volunteers who get voters registered by the head? We have the email and forwarded to certain others to examine it !

[caesu]

if this election is close.
and it comes down to one or two states.
this is going to be a repeat of 2000. with the supreme court deciding the election.
so it better be a landslide.

already accusations of voter fraud / voter purges are going back and forth.

[Slogger]

It is not an accusation when one person signed 10 registration forms.  It's voter fraud, and it's condoned.

There should be jailtime for some folks.

[Slogger]

THE RIGHT TO VOTE, over and over, and over . . . .

By JEANE MacINTOSH Post Correspondent
PAWNS IN ‘FRAUD’: Freddie Johnson, yesterday in Cleveland, and Lateala Goins told of filling out voter registrations multiple times in the ACORN scandal revealed by The Post yesterday.
Last updated: 9:10 am
October 10, 2008
Posted: 4:00 am
October 10, 2008

CLEVELAND - A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.

“Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they’ll give me a dollar to sign up,” said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

“The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, ‘You are?’ I say, ‘Yup,’ and then they say, ‘Can you just sign up again?’ ” he said.

Johnson used the same information on all of his registration cards, and officials say they usually catch and toss out duplicate registrations. But the practice sparks fear that some multiple registrants could provide different information and vote more than once by absentee ballot.

ACORN is under investigation in Ohio and at least eight other states - including Missouri, where the FBI said it’s planning to look into potential voter fraud - for over-the-top efforts to get as many names as possible on the voter rolls regardless of whether a person is registered or eligible.

It’s even under investigation in Bridgeport, Conn., for allegedly registering a 7-year-old girl to vote, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

Meanwhile, a federal judge yesterday ordered Ohio’s Secretary of State to verify the identity of newly registered voters by matching them with other government doc u ments. The order was in response to a Republican lawsuit unrelated to the ACORN probe in Cuyahoga County, in which at least three people, including Johnson, have been subpoenaed.

Bribing citizens with gifts, property or anything of value is a fourth-degree felony in Ohio, punishable by up to 18 months in prison. And it’s a fifth-degree felony - punishable by 12 months in jail - for a person to pay “compensation on a fee-per-registration” system when signing up someone to vote.

Johnson, who works at a cellphone kiosk in downtown Cleveland, said he was a sitting duck for the signature hunters, but was always happy to help them out in exchange for a smoke or a little scratch. He’d collected 10 to 20 cigarettes and anywhere from $10 to $15, he said.

The Cleveland voting probe, first reported by The Post yesterday, also focused on Lateala Goins, who said she put her name on multiple voter registrations. She guessed ACORN canvassers then put fake addresses on them. “You can tell them you’re registered as many times as you want - they do not care,” she said.

ACORN spokesman Kris Harsh said the group does not tolerate its workers paying people to sign the voter-registration cards.

ACORN’s political wing has endorsed Barack Obama for president, but Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign in Ohio, said ACORN has no role in its get-out-the-vote drive.

During the primary season, however, the Obama camp paid another group, Citizen Service Inc., $832,598 for various political services, according to Federal Elections Commission filings. That group and ACORN share the same board of directors.

In Wisconsin yesterday, John McCain blasted ACORN.

“No one should be corrupting the most precious right we have, that is the right to vote,” he said.

It’s a right Johnson will exercise. “Yeah, I’ve registered enough - I might as well vote.”

jeane.macintosh@nypost.com

[San]

This was in the New York Post.

http://www.nypost.com/delonas/delonas.htm

[Sam]

It used to be a well known fact about Voter corruption in Illinois my home state. They say dead folks were allowed to vote. There were also payments made to wino's to vote . At one time it was so bad they made a law that the bars could not open until after the polls closed.

So voter fraud is nothing new just higher stakes.

[WhiskeyGirl]

From - http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/local-voter-fraud-claims-rise/story.aspx?guid=%7BCFE52E66-5245-4B0E-AFF5-0FC371133096%7D&dist=hppr

When DeeAnn Athan received a new voter registration card at her downtown law office a few weeks ago, she figured it must be a mistake.

The card had her age and middle initial wrong and a different Social Security and driver's license number. The only things correct were her gender and party affiliation.

After making a few calls, Athan discovered she had two voter registrations on the books at the Hillsborough County elections office. One had her place of residence listed as her West Shore Boulevard home; the other her Kennedy Boulevard office. ...

Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson said the discrepancy is likely a case of voter registration fraud by a third party group that pays people to register voters. ...

Hillsborough elections officials have come across numerous other questionable voter registration applications in the run-up to the Nov. 4 general election, which has seen hundreds of thousands of new voters added to election rolls across the state. ...

With the general election only weeks away, scores of fraudulent voter registrations are being investigated across the country, most of them submitted by third party groups.

One group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has registered some 1.3 million voters nationwide, is facing allegations of fraud from elections officials in Wisconsin, North Carolina, New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio and Missouri. ...

I wonder how many people are registered to vote at the address of their employment?  How many would ever go to the polling place by their work?

IIRC, many places check against graveyard address, and empty lots, but how many check against commercial buildings?  Office complexes?

How many are getting absentee ballots?

I think verifying voter records should be a priority.  Who is stopping the many efforts to clean up this process? 

Why wouldn't everyone want the voting records to be as clean as possible?  What's wrong with showing a picture ID to vote?

Can the standards/requirements to vote go any lower? 

[WhiskeyGirl]

Ohio Secretary of State on ACORN Voter Fraud Allegations 'On the Record'

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: And if the economy isn't shaking you enough, try this. There are huge fears of voter fraud in the presidential election. We're 26 days from the election, one of the biggest horse races in American history. And already there is threat of big trouble. All eyes are on a handful of swing states where several voter fraud investigations are threatening a basic idea, whether or not free and fair elections will be held.

Tonight, we have a full report, starting in Ohio, where there is breaking news. As we reported earlier, a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order and has ruled that an Ohio secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, is breaking federal law, not taking enough steps to prevent voter fraud.

The secretary of state is appealing the decision and says in a statement, in part says, "My office will do everything in its power to ensure that the state's 88 county boards of elections can continue to allow early voting to proceed uninterrupted and to assist them with their preparation to ensure a smooth election for the voters of Ohio."

(snip)

KEN BLACKWELL (R), FORMER OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE: In Ohio, elections are managed at the local level. We have 88 county boards of elections with equal number of Democrats and Republicans. We are protected (ph) against a central office controlling elections, which would mean (ph) that it would be an easier target of opportunity for someone trying to fix, rig or disrupt an election. So there is safety in decentralization.

So what the people at the local level are saying is, Let us do our job. Give us the tools, empower us so that we can did our job. And the secretary's instinct is to centralize, is to control, is to manage from Columbus, our state capital.

And I think what the federal judge is saying is that, Look, the responsibility for managing elections is at the local level. You must empower, you must allow them to verify the truthfulness of voter applications, and they must be able to say that the whole principle that is the foundation of our democracy, one person, one vote, one election.

VAN SUSTEREN: Secretary Blackwell, it's sort of -- it's interesting to note that -- I mean, I -- she's going to take this case -- she's going to appeal this temporary restraining order against her to the United States court of appeals for the sixth circuit, so there will be another review.

BLACKWELL: Absolutely.

VAN SUSTEREN: But just -- without -- I mean, just so the viewers get an idea of politics in your state, and it's not to assign any sort of partisanship on behalf of the current secretary...

BLACKWELL: Right.

VAN SUSTEREN: ... But this was brought -- this temporary restraining order was brought by the Ohio Republican Party. And what party is she a member of? Is she a Democrat or a Republican?

BLACKWELL: She is a Democrat. But again, Greta, I want to underscore something. We won't be able to solve this crisis in confidence unless we do it on a bipartisan basis. And so whatever our philosophical difference is, we must pull together to build voter confidence in the election returns. And the way that you do that is that you trust but you verify. And you must be able to verify the veracity of voter registrations and the vote count at the local level, at the county level in the state of Ohio.

VAN SUSTEREN: And of course, when you say it's bipartisan -- and the only thing that sort of rubs everybody a little bit raw right now is it's not like this election is a big surprise. We've known about it for four years and we're 27 days out. And to fight any sort of effort to trust and verify is distressing because we need to have confidence.

BLACKWELL: Well, it is distressing. And let me just say this. I think it's outrageous that someone would suggest that there is not enough evidence to be highly suspicious of a rogue organization like ACORN. They do a disservice to the community-based organizations across this country that try to empower the poor and to make sure that we have -- give voice to all of our citizens. This is an organization that has a history of voter fraud. This is an organization that in at least 12 states are under investigation. And I'll just tell you that in Nevada, it's a Democrat...

read the rest here...  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,435744,00.html

imho...with the low standards set to register to vote in many places, where would there be ANY evidence to show voter fraud?

How would anyone find evidence to show that someone voted more than once?  Voted in multiple places?  That a name on a voter roll is actually a real person? 

[caesu]

States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal

Chris Livingston for The New York Times

Jennifer Wilson a Florida elections specialist in Volusia County, scans voter documents into a computer.

By IAN URBINA
Published: October 8, 2008

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html

i don't understand why voting runs so often in so many problems.

this is how it works in Holland:

1. a few weeks before the election every citizen gets a voter invitation send to their address
on the invitation are the opening hours and location of the voting office for your area.
it says that you have to bring an ID with you.

2. on election day you go to your voting office, hand them your voter invitation and when asked your ID.
they've got a long list with names of everyone who got invited to that voting office.

3. they tick your name on that list. and then you vote.

for every neighbourhood there is a voting office.
i never had to wait for more than 5 minutes.
national turnout is usually around 60%.

i think this 'voter registration' is causing a lot of problems in American elections.

[caesu]

correction: national turnout is usually around 80%.

[crazybabyborg]

Sounds like a plan to me, caesu. Makes a lot of sense to me. Acorn would raise Hell over the prospects, saying that it would discriminate against  homeless people.

[caesu]

Sounds like a plan to me, caesu. Makes a lot of sense to me. Acorn would raise Hell over the prospects, saying that it would discriminate against  homeless people.

i think the homeless can have a mailbox at some homeless shelter if they want to.
to get their invitation there.

[caesu]

Bogus "Voter Fraud Charges" Aim to Camouflage Voter Suppression
October 10, 2008

ACORN has just completed the largest, most successful nonpartisan voter registration drive in U.S. history. We helped 1.3 million low-income, minority and young voters across the country register to vote.

Unfortunately, just as in 2006, that success in bringing people into the democratic process, have been greeted with unfounded accusations to disparage our work and help maintain the status quo of an unbalanced electorate.

After a similar spate of charges against ACORN in 2006, we learned that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had fired Republican U.S. Attorneys because they refused to prosecute ACORN and other voter assistance groups on trumped up fraud charges. This was the heart of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal that led Karl Rove, Gonzales and other top Department of Justice officials to resign. Because the press didn’t catch on until long after the election, it was part of a successful strategy to create an unfounded specter of voter fraud and to suppress voting.

Key Facts:

1. In order to help 1.3 million people register to vote, we hired more than 13,000 registration assistance workers. As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift.

2. Any large voter registration operation will have a small percentage of workers who turn in bogus registration forms, Their goal clearly is not to cast a fraudulent vote. It is simply to defraud their employer, ACORN, by getting a paycheck without earning it. ACORN is the victim of this fraud – not the perpetrator.

3. In nearly every case that has been reported , it was ACORN that discovered the bad forms, and called them to the attention of election authorities, putting the forms in a package that identified them in writing as suspicious, encouraging election officials to investigate, and offering to help with prosecutions. We are required by law to turn in all forms, but instead of just turning them in and figuring that it is the responsibility of the board of elections to figure out which are valid, we spend millions of dollars verifying that forms are valid, and then separate out those that are suspicious.

4. This has nothing to do with “voter fraud” – nothing at all to do with anyone trying to cast an extra vote. There has never been a single reported instance in which bogus registration forms have led to anyone voting improperly. To do that, they would have to show up at the polls, prove their identity as all first-time registrants must, and risk jail. The people who turned in these forms did so not because they wanted an extra vote, but because they didn’t care enough to make sure eligible people got to vote at all.

5. When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. But for some reason, when ACORN turns voter registration workers over to the authorities for filling out bogus forms, it gets accused of “voter fraud.” This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, these charges are outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated.

6. Similar attacks were launched against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. The bogus charges were at the heart of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal that led to the resignations of Karl Rove, Attorney General Ablerto Gonzales and other top Justice Department Officials. It turned out that it was the charges that were fraudulent, and that they were part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression. Republican U.S. Attorneys David Iglesias (NM), Todd Graves (MO), and John McKay (WA) all were fired primarily because they refused to prosecute similar bogus charges of “voter fraud.” Another U.S. Attorney, Bradley Schlozman, who did politicize prosecutions against former ACORN canvassers, was forced to acknowledge under cross examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee that ACORN was the victim of fraud by its employees and ACORN had caught the employees and had identified them to law enforcement.

7. The goals of the people orchestrating these attacks are to distract ACORN from helping people vote and to justify massive voter suppression. That’s the real voter fraud; the noise about a small fraction of the forms ACORN has turned in is meant to get the press and public take their eyes off the real threat, while those hurling the charges are stealing people’s right to vote in broad daylight. They have already tried to prevent Ohio from registering voters at its early voting sites. In Michigan, they planned to use foreclosure notices to challenge thousands of voters. And if this year is like past years, they are preparing to use this so-called voter fraud to justify massive challenges to voters in minority precincts on Election Day.

The Details:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in,. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card . ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

Fact: No criminal charges related to voter registration have ever been brought against ACORN or partner organizations. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes — evidence which in most cases WE called to the attention of authorities

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN’s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered

ACORN will not be intimidated, we will not be provoked, and in this important moment in history we will not allow anyone to distract us from these vital efforts to empower our constituencies and our communities to speak for themselves.

http://tinyurl.com/3emz66

nothing wrong with registering as much people as possible to get a high turnout.

i understand why Republicans hate ACORN so much.
because they fear that these newly registered voter are more likely to vote Democrat.

no surprise that i read about voter purges of people who lost their home due to foreclosure.
these people are also more likely to vote Democrat.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/10/06/republican-dirty-tricks-secret-purges-aimed-at-suppressing-votes/

maybe that's why Republicans tend to hate community organizers so much.
during the Republican convention community organizer were ridiculed.
but in my opinion community organizers are just lobbyists for the people - instead of for corporations.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/12/01/491645.aspx