ACORN: Voter Fraud, Illegal Contributions, and the Coming Liberal Nanny State

(my latest column)

Have you ever wondered about “community organizing” and the swarming “get out the vote” goon squads that the Left increasingly mobilizes for presidential elections? ACORN is one of the largest of these entities and has an extensive and long history with Barack Obama. It is one of the central players in the massive Democratic voter registration drives you’ve been hearing about over the last few months.

What we are beginning to learn is that it is little more than a massive exercise in voter fraud and mischief of all kinds. Dead Indians and illegal aliens have long been a significant Democratic voting base in certain parts of the country but now that concept of electoral fraud has spread throughout the nation.

 

ACORN has long suckled at the public teat and is rewarding such trust and expenditures of the public treasury by managing to subject itself to scrutiny or investigation in no less than eleven different states by submitting thousands of fraudulent new voter registrations. The usual dead suspects are now being supplemented by small children and even the names of sport celebrities.

 

A good example from the New York Post.

 

Acorn paid me in cash & cigs

 

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.

 

The best part of that post was the quote “in apparent violation of Ohio law” for someone registering to vote 72 times. We wouldn’t actually want to call that illegal now would we? What a bold reporter.

We wouldn’t want to somehow taint such a wonderful organization as Acorn that is working so hard to assure the election of Barack Obama.

 

The Wall Street Journal article Obama and Acorn: Community organizers, phony voters, and your tax dollars.

 

That’s just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book.

Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago “community organizer” at Acorn’s side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn’s leaders for being “smack dab in the middle” of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.

During his tenure on the board of Chicago’s Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for “staging, sound, lighting.” It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

See also:

ACORN’s Las Vegas headquarters has been raided by Nevada authorities looking for evidence of voter fraud. 

 

In response to the Las Vegas raid, Republican Nevada Sen. John Ensign and seven other senators penned a letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency calling for the suspension of taxpayer dollars to “controversial groups like ACORN.” The letter referred to contributions that potentially could come from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. 

In 2006, ACORN also committed what Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed called the “worse case of election fraud” in the state’s history. 

In the case, ACORN submitted just over 1,800 new voter registration forms, and all but six of the 1,800 names were fake. 

More recently, 27,000 registrations handled by the group from January to July 2008 “went into limbo because they were incomplete, inaccurate, or fraudulent,” said James Terry, chief public advocate at the Consumers Rights League.

 

It is outright criminal negligence that a single penny of the public money has ever crossed the palm of ACORN, let alone the millions of taxpayer dollars that continue to fund such groups. And shame on Obama for having ever been involved with ACORN to begin with. When taxpayers are in effect funding the takeover of the state by the advocates of the Leftist ideology, any hope for the Republic is probably long past. Did I mention that the “bailout bill” added some $140 million plus to the ACORN coffers?

 

None of this will be responsible for Obama’s victory, but it is instructive, nonetheless. One the one hand, it clarifies Obama’s radical, machine-politics rearing, and gives usa taste of what his administration may hold.

 

Can you imagine if a Republican were intimately entwined with a corrupt racket whose sole focus was to defraud the US treasury and to despoil the US political system? Now imagine if that Republican were a party-radical and his party’s nominee for President. – my blogger DFV at www.Constitutionclub.wordpress.com.

 

ACORN has hurridly attempted to scrub it’s home page as scrutiny and press coverage of their activities has sharply increased. But apparently not fast enough. I haven’t taken the time to wade through these links but what they contained worried ACORN enough to warrant their quick and unceremonious removal.

 

Case Study: Chicago, The Barack Obama Campaign

 

Towards a Chicago School of Youth Organizing

 

 

Hand in hand with all this Left wing shanagins is the revelations that there been thousands of dollars in illegal campaign donations flowing into the Obama coffers. Between these two, um, “irregularities” there should at least be an eyebrow or two raised as the minions of The One seek to ensure victory no matter what the cost, or what the law may have to say about the matter.

 

From the New York Times

Fictitious Donors Found in Obama Finance Records

 

…The complaint followed an article on the conservative Web site Newsmax.com that highlighted thousands of dollars in contributions, made in increments of $25 dating back to March, from “Good Will” in Austin, Tex., who listed his employer as “Loving” and his occupation as “You,” as well as thousands in small contributions that started last November from a “Doodad Pro” in Nunda, N.Y., with the same employer and occupation.

 

When you strip away the political correctness and put away the pretend Greek temple pillars you don’t really have much left. Eric at TygrrrrExpress.com had this to say  about Barack Obama.

 

He does not transcend race. He does not transcend politics. He does not transcend anything. He climbed the ranks of Chicago, which does not happen ethically.

He was a community organizer. So are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. This is not about race. It is about corruption. Community Organizers are agitators. They are rabble rousers. This is how Obama ended up knee deep in ACORN. They are sympatico in their belief that community organizing, regardless of the law, is fair game.

 

Like lemmings off a cliff, the American people are getting ready to hand the presidency to someone who will, with his congressional allies, work to create the most powerful, intrusive and hideously obese federal government that has ever been seen. The plans have been laid to intrude on every aspect of your personal, financial and business life. All the name of climate change, the public good, and saving you from yourself. The question is only how quickly we will manage to model ourselves as some sort of post-modernist,  European style, socialist state and how much real freedom will you willingly hand over without a fight to an entity that will never give it back. These are the questions we as a nation will very quickly be forced to ask of itself. The spirit of liberty may not be pleased with the answer.

 

With Bush managing to soil the Republican brand, the netroots and the street hustlers doing their part, and Obama promising the sun, moon and stars and everything in between (not to mention Oprah proclaiming him “The One”) this race is all but over and the outcome all but certain.

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Be careful what you wish for. Indeed, change is coming. But it is certainly not the kind of change we need. If you thought the current state of affairs and the collusion between big government and big business was bad, wait until you see the coming Liberal nanny state.