Investigating ACORN

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10142008/news/politics/bogus_voter_booted_amid_probe_of_acorn_133540.htm

BOGUS VOTER BOOTED AMID PROBE OF ACORN
4,000 OF LEFT-WING GROUP’S SIGN-UPS ARE SHADY

October 14, 2008
Investigators probing ACORN have learned that an Ohio man registered to vote several times and cast a bogus ballot with a fake address, officials said yesterday, as they revealed that nearly 4,000 registration applications supplied by the left-leaning activist group were suspect.

The vote of Darnell Nash, one of four people subpoenaed in a Cuyahoga County probe of ACORN’s voter-registration activities, was canceled and his case was turned over to local prosecutors and law enforcement, Board of Elections officials said yesterday.

Nash had registered to vote repeatedly from an address that belonged to a legitimately registered voter, officials said during a hearing at which the subpoenaed voters were to testify.

Board officials had contacted Nash this summer, questioned his address and told him to stop repeat registering.

But still, he breezed into Ohio election offices – the state allows early voting for president – reregistered with a fake address and cast a paper ballot, officials said.

“He came in on 9/30 and Mr. Nash again registered to vote at [someone else's] address, and he cast a ballot,” said board official Jane Platten.

Nash did not turn up for the hearing.

The Post reported last week on the Cleveland-area probe and the subpoenas, which were sent out to four people – including two voters who said they were hounded by ACORN workers to register over and over, even when they warned they’d already done so.

It’s the latest issue in the probe of ACORN’s registering voters in Ohio, one of at least nine states where officials are investigating similar reports of phony sign-ups by the group.

At the same time, officials said, some 5 percent, or 3,650, of the 73,000 total registration cards turned in by ACORN in the Cleveland area from its Project Vote initiative to sign up low-income voters were “questionable,” Platten said.

There were “egregious acts of registering multiple times,” said Platten. “The extent of it is beyond the resources of this board.”

Nash’s case and three others were turned over to authorities yesterday, said Ryan Miday, a spokesman for prosecutor Bill Masson.

“We will consider presenting it to a grand jury,” Miday said.

A member of the board said if necessary, the FBI or federal prosecutors could be brought in for assistance.

Still, members of the bipartisan board downplayed any voter fraud.

And Platten insisted officials with ACORN have offered “any and all” help in probing the questionable activities. Katy Gall, the Ohio state director for ACORN, said her group is cooperating fully with the investigation.

She added that her group has fired anyone who was found soliciting duplicate registrations.

ACORN, whose political arm has endorsed Democratic nominee Barack Obama, has signed up more than 1.3 million voters for this cycle.

ACORN adviser Scott Levenson said, “If one of the 13,000 [people] we hired is potentially a bad apple in the bunch, we encourage the authorities to prosecute, as appropriate, anyone that did the wrong thing. We discipline [and] we fire workers who [abuse their position] . . . We encourage prosecutors to follow suit.”

He also denied suggestions that the group pays canvassers by the number of names they sign up, and that they have quotas.

Also:

* Two of the four subpoenaed voters, Freddie Johnson and Christopher Barkley, met privately with sheriff’s deputies and described what they’d told The Post about being hounded by ACORN workers. Barkley testified at the hearing that some of the registration cards listing his name weren’t filled out by him.

* In an e-mail to supporters, John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, slammed “the left-wing activist group ACORN” and suggested, “We can’t allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election.”

jeane.macintosh@nypost.com

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/07/acorn-watch-voter-fraud-and-mortgage-scams-on-your-dime/

August 7, 2008
Barack Obama’s taxpayer-subsidized old friends at ACORN have been very, very busy lately. And ACORN Watch is here to give you the rundown on all the latest shenanigans on your dime.

* In Milwaukee, election officials are investigating fake names registered by ACORN workers– a favorite voter fraud 101 ploy of ACORN workers. No word on whether anyone used “Fruto Boy Crispila:”

Criminal investigations could be launched against at least six voter registration workers who tried to add dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to the voter rolls, according to the Milwaukee Election Commission and the organization that employed them.

Officials are reviewing some 200 to 300 fraudulent voter registration cards, Sue Edman, the commission’s executive director, said Wednesday.

And even though the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now caught the fraud and reported it before the cards were turned in, the incident revived a four-year-old partisan debate over the integrity of Wisconsin’s voter registration process, as political groups step up efforts to sign up voters for the Nov. 4 presidential election.

“One woman called us to complain because her husband has been dead for 10 years and a voter registration was submitted,” Edman said.

In about 12 cases, deputy registrars paid by ACORN were “making people up or registering people that were still in prison,” said Carolyn Castore, ACORN’s state political director.

And in other cases, workers used the same address for numerous voters or used driver’s license numbers that did not fit the voters’ birth dates, Edman said. But most of the fraud involved submitting duplicate cards for voters who were already registered, and forging the voters’ signatures, Castore said.

ACORN found the problems and fired a dozen workers, Castore said. Five of them appeared to be working together, she added.
In New Mexico, it’s the same old story of ACORN using criminals to lead voter registration drives. KRQE reports:

—
ANDERSON (Anchor): If you registered to vote outside a supermarket, at a fair or even on a college campus, your information may have been collected by a criminal. News 13’s Michael Herzenberg is live in the newsplex.

MICHAEL HERZENBERG (Reporter): The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now or, ACORN, does not go door to door. But in public places they admit at times they employ criminals. They say like law abiding citizens they employ make great workers. Audrey Padilla works for the non profit organization ACORN registering people to vote.

AUDREY PADILLA: I think it’s a really powerful thing to vote.

HERZENBERG: The information she gathers on this form can be powerful if criminals get their hands on it and they have. Jeffrey Mahaffey did and he was convicted with 2 counts of raping a child, a habitual offender who stole a car. Yvonne Chacon did too – she pleaded no contest to 2 counts of forgery, 7 more counts are pending and so are 3 counts of credit card fraud. Michelle Rael also collected voter information for ACORN while under the supervision of probation and parole for drug possession and 1 count of identity theft.

RAY SCHUTLZ (APD Police Chief): It’s very alarming and very concerning to me.

HERZENBERG: We showed Albuquerque police chief Ray Shultz the records of nine people accused or convicted of crimes who collected voter registration information for ACORN.

SCHULTZ: This information in, you know, the hands of the wrong person could be devastating.

ACORN: I find it interesting. I do understand that it would draw some concerns.

HERZENBERG: ACORN spokeswoman Stephanie Blackwell says the nine people no longer work for ACORN but they lasted at most 8 days

HERZENBERG: How much personal information did they get?

ACORN: I don’t know exact numbers in terms of how many cards per person that they collected. I do know, so far, total throughout the state, we’ve registered over 60,000 voters.
In Florida, William Amos points to an ACORN-assisted woman with no job who secured a $42,000 loan on a house that she can’t figure out how to pay. Go figure:

Carolyn Patmon has lived in what she calls her “modest little house” in Carver Shores for 38 years. At one point, she owned it free and clear. Then she took out a loan to add a sun porch.

Because she was on disability and wasn’t working, she was offered a mortgage rate of 14 percent.

“But the rate was supposed to go down in a couple of years,” said Patmon, 59.

It didn’t. What the mortgage brokers had told her and what the fine print in the loan documents said were two different things. Within a few years, Patmon found herself owing $115,000 on a $42,000 loan — and being sued for foreclosure

Nothing about her story is particularly remarkable these days — except how it’s ending. Because Patmon went to Orlando ACORN, a nonprofit community organization with chapters nationwide, she has been able to stop the foreclosure process and is working on having her loan modified to more affordable terms.

Experts say plenty of help is available to those such as Patmon, but that homeowners need to seek assistance early and often. And they shouldn’t expect it to be easy.

The WSJ’s overview of ACORN’s milking of the housing crisis is here.

Rep. Tom Feeney has called on the Attorney General to investigate:

Dear Attorney General Mukasey:

We are writing to request an immediate investigation into whether or not the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, is engaging in criminal voting fraud, promoting fraudulent registrations, or criminally misusing taxpayer funds.

With the next election cycle quickly approaching, we are confident that the Department of Justice will be ensuring the integrity of our federal elections. Although the administration of elections is chiefly a function of state government, the Department of Justice must ensure that nationwide criminal voter fraud is targeted and eliminated as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Voter fraud represents a serious threat to the validity of all American elections. Each and every illegal vote cast cancels out the thoughtfully considered vote of an American citizen. In April, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana statute requiring registered voters to present photo identification in order to vote. The Court, in a 6-3 opinion, noted that “the risk of voter fraud [is] real…[and] could affect the outcome of a close election.”[1]

One organization in particular has developed a reputation for lawlessness in the electoral process. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has repeatedly been associated with voting fraud, turning in fraudulent registrations, and misuse of taxpayer funds. The laundry list of inappropriate conduct including investigations and convictions of individuals associated with ACORN is far too long to include in this letter, but here are a few key examples:

* Last year in Washington, felony charges were filed against several paid employees and supervisors of ACORN. Over 1,700 fraudulent registrations turned in by the employees were revoked in one of the largest instances of voting fraud in the United States.[2]

* In March of 2008, an ACORN worker was sentenced in Berks County Pennsylvania to 146 days to 23 months in the county prison for making 29 phony voter-registration forms to collect a cash bonus from ACORN.[3]

* Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder, Wade Rathke, embezzled nearly $1 million from Acorn and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000 but a small group of executives decided to keep the information from almost all of the group’s board members and not to alert law enforcement. Dale Rathke remained on Acorn’s payroll until a month ago, when disclosure of his theft by foundations and other donors forced the organization to dismiss him.[4]

* As of July 2008, at least three ACORN workers have been convicted of voter fraud in Kansas City, and one is awaiting trial. These ACORN workers in Kansas City flooded voter registration rolls with over 35,000 false or questionable voter registration forms.[5]

* St. Louis, Mo., officials found that in 2006 over 1,000 addresses listed on its registrations did not exist. “We met twice with ACORN before their drive, but our requests completely fell by the wayside,” said Democrat Matt Potter, the city’s deputy elections director.[6] Later, federal authorities indicted eight of the group’s local workers. One of the eight pleaded guilty last month.

* The Consumers Rights League reports that ACORN used taxpayer money to support “corporate shakedown tactics, counseling of potential homebuyers to use “undocumented” or “under the table” income to obtain mortgages, and to assist in obtaining mortgages for undocumented workers.[7]

At the very least, this pattern of conduct by individuals associated with ACORN has created an air of reasonable suspicion that ACORN is either engaged in criminal enterprise or does not have sufficient safeguards in place to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to those ends.

ACORN has routinely assured Americans that the aforementioned events and those like them represent isolated events by individuals not representing ACORN. Consequently, we are confident that they will welcome such an investigation to support their contentions that this pattern of misconduct is not endemic to ACORN’s operations.

We must do everything in our power to ensure that our electoral processes continue to reflect our dedication to a lawful democracy. Our civil rights and voting laws are designed to ensure that every American has their vote counted. Unfortunately, registering dead or fictitious voters serves no purpose other than to ultimately misrepresent and dilute the voice of the American people.

We respectfully request that you inform us whether you plan to initiate an investigation as soon as possible, and no later than September 8, 2008. We also request that you inform us whether the results of your review will be provided to Congress and made public. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Too bad the Obamedia won’t ask ACORN’s old friend for comment.

http://www.alabamapolicy.org/gary_blog/archived_article.php?id_art=327

ACORN, which gets about forty percent of its funding from the government, is closely aligned with organized labor and just about every left-wing group in the country. They are an anti-capitalism group that has a history of promoting policies that undermine the free market system and promote the welfare state. They are also known for using high pressure tactics to push their agenda.

After the 2000 election, ACORN launched Project Vote, a major voter registration and turn-out-the-vote effort. By 2004, they claimed to have registered over 1.1 million new voters and to have contacted over 2.3 million voters during their “get out the vote” drive. These efforts resulted in widespread accusations of voter registration fraud and voter fraud in hotly contested states such as Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Federal investigators found that one ACORN worker in Ohio was given crack cocaine in exchange for submitting fraudulent voter registrations that included underage voters, dead people and such “famous” Ohio citizens as Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey.

After the 2006 election, ACORN was under investigation again for fraudulent activities in Missouri and Ohio and about a dozen other states. In the state of Washington, seven ACORN workers have been convicted for their role in what Washington election officials called the biggest election fraud scheme in the history of the state. ACORN’s voter registration efforts there put Frekkie Magoal, Fruto Boy Crispila and Veronica Mars on the Washington voter roles.

On October 7th, Nevada election officials raided ACORN’s Las Vegas office as part of a major investigation of election fraud involving their voter registration efforts. The list of voters that they registered included members of the Dallas Cowboys.
On October 10th, CNN reported that officials in Lake County, Indiana stopped processing about 5,000 voter registration forms turned in by ACORN workers just before the registration deadline on October 6th when the first 2,100 forms turned out to be phony. According to the CNN report, Sally LaSorta, a Democrat on the Board of Registrars, “called the forms fraudulent and said whoever filed them broke the law.”

The most significant fraud watch is in Ohio, where a 6th Federal District Court has now upheld a federal circuit court judge’s order requiring the Ohio Secretary of State to set up a system to verify the eligibility of newly registered voters. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, had fought against having to verify eligibility. In addition to the federal court order, a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) lawsuit has been filed against ACORN on behalf of two Ohio voters by The Buckeye Institute, a Columbus-based public policy organization. The suit alleges that ACORN’s submission of fraudulent voter registrations dilutes the votes of legally registered voters and deprives them of the right to participate in an honest and effective election process.

Sent to me by Webfoot:

24,000 Felons Getting Ballots, Despite Eligibility Questions
Chris Halsne
KIRO 7 Eyewitness News Investigative Reporter
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 – updated: 12:01 pm PST November 6, 2008
SEATTLE — An exclusive KIRO Team 7 Investigation discovers the state will send ballots to thousands of convicted felons in the next week, even though many can’t legally vote.
The Secretary of State’s Office fired up a new multimillion-dollar computer in 2006. Its job was to catch, and then cancel, illegal voters.
Well, not all illegal voters.
KIRO-TV recently ran its own data to double check the state’s work. Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne found out the system was set up to ignore the existence of approximately 24,000 convicted felons.
The State of Washington never stopped sending Tracy Wilkinson ballots in the mail, even though it appears she’s not eligible to vote.
In 2002, she pleaded guilty to a felony prescription drug charge, then, according to court files, failed to pay all her fines.
A Snohomish County judge ruled “the defendant is not entitled to restoration of civil rights or discharge” – legal speak for “you can’t vote!”
Wilkinson admitted to Halsne that she is a felon, but thought she could still legally vote.
Halsne: “You’re a convicted felon?”
Wilkinson: “Yeah. I am. I fought it, but they said no jail. So, then, it really never bothered me because I thought, well, I’m never going to be president, so I don’t care. Really. Then, when you brought up that I’m not supposed to vote, they send me my ballots. I’ve been voting for the last 10 years. ”
An extensive computer analysis, independently conducted by KIRO Team 7 Investigators, found that Wilkinson is just one of 23,927 criminals on the active voter database.
6,812 of them are considered “very likely voters” because they already cast a ballot in other elections this year.
Unless something changes soon, every one of the felons will get a ballot for the November election, even though the state admits it has no idea if they are eligible.
Sources familiar with the election program, who asked we not identify them, tell us the new computer system was intentionally programmed to ignore a certain subset of felony data. The reasoning behind it was this: Because most of the felons on our list committed their crimes prior to the computer going online in 2006, it was going to be too difficult to research which ones can legally vote.
Jonathan Bechtle is an attorney at a conservative think tank, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. He thinks we have found a significant flaw and one that could affect a close election.
“So we’re not going to follow the law because it seems too hard to do? Sorry. That just doesn’t cut it. The law says ‘felons, you can’t vote.’ The Secretary has been given the authority, given the funds to put this database together. They should be able to do this,” said Bechtle.
Washington’s convicted felons can’t legally vote until two things happen. First, they must meet all of their court ordered conditions: Prison time, restitution, the works. Then, depending on the year, that felon also needs a judge to sign an order of discharge or restoration of civil rights.
A long-term study by the Washington Department of Corrections shows that about 65 percent of felons fail to pay off all their restitution or finish their court ordered conditions.
Using admittedly simplistic math, if our data shows 6,812 felons voted in primary elections this year, that means 65 percent of them or about 4,400 will illegally cast ballots in November.
If all active voters who also appear to be convicted felons are counted, that’s more than 15,000 questionable votes.
Secretary of State Sam Reed is proud his office purged 40,000 dead, duplicate, underage, and non-citizen voters off the rolls since 2006. However, he admits that the felon issue remains a problem.
“They have so many people out there that have not completed their sentences. It’s almost impossible for us to track that, but we are working with the courts to do it, but that is one of our challenges,” said Reed.
For Tracy Wilkinson, her answer is simple. It also happens to be the same thought process being used by the Secretary of State’s Office: Let all criminals vote if they aren’t actually sitting in prison, jail, or under active supervision of the Department of Corrections.
“As long as they’re paying taxes, being part of the community and doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they should have the right to vote,” said Wilkinson.
One thing is very clear: The whole system for tracking felons is a mess. We found thousands of data entry errors, including questions regarding whether certain criminals (including Tracy Wilkinson) were convicted of felonies or gross misdemeanors or both.
Because of those discrepancies, elections officials don’t think it’s “practical” to eliminate any of the 24,000 or so felons in question. Instead, all will be handed ballots for the upcoming primary election.

Copyright 2008 by KIROTV.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

GOOD NEWS FOR NOW

CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ACORN

CNN Special Investigations Unit (CNN) — The Roman Catholic Church is cutting off funds to the community organizing group ACORN, citing complaints over its voter registration drives in the November 4 election as part of the reason.

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development froze its contributions to the group in June amid allegations that Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million.

This week, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Baltimore, Maryland, the campaign’s chairman said it was cutting all ties with the group.

“We simply had too many questions and concerns to permit further CCHD funding of ACORN groups,” Roger Morin, the auxiliary bishop of New Orleans, Louisiana, told his colleagues in a letter to the conference. Watch why fired board members allege a cover-up »

The CCHD has donated more than $7.3 million to ACORN-related projects over the past decade, including $40,000 to an ACORN chapter in Las Vegas, Nevada, that was raided before the election in an investigation into fraudulent voter registration forms. Among other questionable documents, the ACORN chapter submitted registration forms for members of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

ACORN contends it has tried to help head off election fraud.

“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,” ACORN said in an October 9 news release.
Morin said a church review completed in November found ACORN no longer met standards of further funding.

The reported embezzlement dates back several years, but was only recently disclosed to ACORN board members and donors. Morin said the registration fraud complaints “raise additional serious concerns.”

“Nonpartisan voter registration, especially in poor communities, is important and needed work. Too often, poor voters are not registered or are not encouraged to participate in the vital choices that affect their families and communities,” he wrote. However, he said, the ban on donations to ACORN won’t be lifted “until and unless it is clear that CCHD funds will not go to an organization that has engaged in unlawful activities or voter registration fraud.”

In a statement to CNN, ACORN Executive Director Steven Kest said his group is grateful for the church’s funding in the past.

“We look forward to continuing discussions with CCHD officials and the bishops in the months ahead in hopes that we can continue working together on projects, which have been so important to so many in low-income neighborhoods across the country,” Kest said.

However, Ralph McCloud, the Human Development campaign’s director, said the church has “severed ties” with ACORN and there are no plans for further discussion at this time.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/13/acorn.catholics/index.html

————————–
In 2007, the Catholic Church gave ACORN grants totaling $1,037,000. The Sunday before Thanksgiving generous Catholics are given envelopes from the Campaign for Human Development which is suppose to end poverty and injustice. Some of the money did not go to help the poor, but to help with the ACORN voter fraud.

The CCHD-ACORN relationship suddenly became too embarrassing to ignore, and CCHD announced it was suspending (not canceling) the 2008 grants. But the reason given for suspension was not ACORN’s partisan political activity or registration frauds; it was because Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the organization and its affiliates back in 1999 and 2000.

CCHD also announced that it has formed a task force to ensure that Church funds are spent according to the guidelines of the Bishops’ poverty-fighting program. Presumably, the previous millions of dollars given to ACORN were within the Bishops’ guidelines.

So, the money to ACORN has only been suspended. I don’t know what actions can be taken to make sure the Catholic Church does not resume giving ACORN more money/grants.

http://townhall.com/columnists/AmandaCarpenter/2008/10/09/obama_hired_acorn_for_gotv

Thursday, October 09, 2008
Obama Hired ACORN For GOTV

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is the first national candidate ever to hire ACORN, a controversial non-profit accused of voter fraud across the country, for get out the vote activities.
Obama’s campaign paid $800,000 to a subsidiary of the liberally-leaning non-profit Association of Community Organizers for Reform called Citizens Services Incorporated campaign to increase voter turnout.

This information, however, was not properly disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. The Obama campaign said it hired CSI to do “polling, advance work and staging events” according to reports submitted to the FEC during the Democratic primary.

The FEC said the Obama campaign needed to disclose ACORN was engaging in get out the vote activities last August. At the time the Obama campaign called the mistake a “clerical error.”

To date, ACORN has been accused of voter fraud in 15 states this election cycle.

Obama has close ties to the organization. Before becoming a member of the Illinois State Senate, Obama represented ACORN in a lawsuit to help push for “Motor Voter” laws to make it easier for low-income persons to vote.

Later, as director of the Woods Fund and Chairman of the Board of Chicago Annenberg Challenge Obama helped steer funds to ACORN through various grants.

Obama sought ACORN’s endorsement in the Democratic primary telling ACORN members, “Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

“Project Vote” is the name ACORN’s voter registration drives are called. Obama worked for Project Vote for a period of roughly seven months in 1992.

ACORN endorsed Obama for president in February 2008

copy of voter registration secured by ACORN-for Mickey Mouse

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/elections/article852295.ece

http://www.myeyewitnessnews.com/content/uncovers/story/Eyewitness-News-Uncovers-Dead-and-Still-Voting/kUdHw3s23U2AIKZSwP6ItQ.cspx

SHELBY COUNTY, TN — Eyewitness News Uncovers people who were born in the 1800s and still voted in Shelby County.

Eyewitness News Chief Investigator Jeni DiPrizio discovered that there are more than 1,000 dead voters still on the election rolls in Shelby County. And some of them even made it to the polls last August

October 27, 2008
“Indiana official seeks criminal probe of ACORN”
CNN) — Indiana’s secretary of state has requested a criminal investigation into the embattled community organizing group ACORN, which is accused of submitting hundreds of bogus voter registration forms in northern Lake County.

Watch: Drew Griffin on ACORN in Indiana

The request is based on Secretary of State Todd Rokita’s preliminary examination and analysis of 1,438 questionable voter registration applications ACORN submitted in the county, which includes the city of Gary. Rokita, a Republican, has concluded there is “significant, credible evidence” that ACORN violated Indiana and federal law.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/27/indiana-official-seeks-criminal-probe-of-acorn/

(At the very least, articles like this one tell us *who* is on our side and *who* has a problem with ACORN. Pay attention to all those names who popped up to fight against ACORN during election. Chances are that they still want ACORN gone.)

Richardson donor gave to Obama campaign:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28528621/

I’m losing track…how many people connected to BO are under either a federal grand jury investigation or an investigation at another level? Yet BO just slithers away, untouched. And the media dubbed Reagan the Teflon president. Go figure.

48 page document on voter fraud. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20070411voters_draft_report.pdf

The people who did this document did a thorough job of researching. Although they did their research prior to the 2008 election they might be worth pursuing to see if they followed up at all. The document is noted as a draft.

Looks like we may have a friend in Arizona who may be interested in what we are doing.

http://www.azsos.gov/releases/2008/pressrelease38.htm

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
October 15, 2008

Arizona Has Safeguards in Place, Urges Voters to be Diligent
PHOENIX — Secretary of State Jan Brewer released the following statement in the face of many inquiries over the past week regarding the questionable voter registration efforts of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) here in Arizona:

“Too often I have seen groups like ACORN who disenfranchise voters and file fraudulent voter registration forms here in Arizona . The truth of the matter is something needs to be done about private organizations like ACORN that attempt to knowingly deceive the election system.

ACORN has been active in Arizona for several years, and just as in other states, this group has turned in fraudulent and untimely voter registration forms. In each instance, these registration forms were referred to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and relevant County Attorney ‘s offices for further investigation.

In many respects, we are fortunate that such efforts to perpetrate a fraud on Arizona ‘s election process have been unsuccessful. In part, that’s because Arizona ‘s laws and procedures prevent fraudulent registrations from making it on to our voter rolls. For example, Arizona is the only state that requires proof of citizenship for all new registrants. In addition, our laws require those registering to vote provide an Arizona driver license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s Social Security number. This information is then verified against the Motor Vehicle and Social Security databases. No applicant will be registered to vote without having their information verified through this process.

The most unfortunate situation caused by ACORN in Arizona is the filing of untimely registrations. Arizona ‘s voter registration deadline is set twenty-nine days before the election. Too often I’ve seen registration forms collected by ACORN and other private registration drives turned in after the deadline, thereby disenfranchising the voter from voting in that election. It is for this reason that I always recommend that those wishing to vote, register directly with the election authorities.

The public needs to be diligent about questioning private organizations like ACORN that are offering to register them to vote. Although it is legal for a private group to register voters in Arizona , these groups have gone unregulated for too long and it is time for this practice to be seriously reformed. Twice, I authored specific legislation to reform the practice of private voter registration drives, but these efforts were met with resistance. I hope the Legislature will seriously consider my proposals to reform and regulate this industry in the next legislative session.

There are many ways for an individual to register to vote, including online at the Secretary of State’s website, http://www.azsos.gov, or by downloading a form from this site and sending it directly to the voter’s county recorder.”

Ah, the taste of truth lights up the pleasure centers of a PUMA brain like no other endorphin! In seeking a federal investigation, these ACORN-ettes [ACORN 8] are inviting transparency to the fraud-party thus providing an unintended peek at the secrets ACORN keeps from the public.

This, from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review:

By David M Brown
Tribune-Review
Thursday, January 8, 2009

“A group of dissident members is seeking a federal investigation of ACORN for alleged criminal violations stemming from an embezzlement scandal that rocked the organization last year.
The splinter group, ACORN 8, released a 24-page document Wednesday that asks federal investigators to consider fraud, embezzlement and conspiracy charges, and criminal civil rights violations relating to the embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the nonprofit’s accounts and an alleged cover-up of the theft for almost a decade.
“Moreover, due to the admission that a felony has been committed, other federal offenses may have also been committed … ,” states the document signed by 14 members of ACORN 8, including recently expelled members of ACORN’s national board of directors.”
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_606173.html

David M. Brown can be reached at dbrown@tribweb.com or 412-380-5614.

this link provides the election officials information for all the states. It might be useful to have in the future:

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/State_election_agencies#Idaho

substantiate *

Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Is Some Clarification on Voter Fraud Too Much to Ask For?
http://townhall.com/blog/g/80c1054c-7d79-4b39-839c-944e8024d1d6

Posted by: Amanda Carpenter at 1:58 PM

Ron Jones of Philadelphia told CNN’s Brian Todd he was so inspired to vote he voted more than once.

“It’s time for change, man,” Jones said. He complained about the long lines and said that “I decided to come back and vote a couple times.”

* off the “Acorn” topic, but interesting…

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2008/07/15/votinged.html

–Noncitizen voters undermine elections–
In Texas, Florida, Maryland, California and even in Georgia, there is evidence that illegal aliens may have voted in past elections.

http://www.northjersey.com/news/elections/31151814.html

FBI investigates ACORN’s role in voter fraud
Friday, October 17, 2008
BY LARA JAKES JORDAN
NorthJersey.com

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election.

A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation. A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of inquiries in several states, including a raid on ACORN’s office in Las Vegas, for any evidence of a coordinated national effort.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations, particularly so close to an election.

Two spokesmen for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, on Thursday said the FBI has not contacted the group.

“ACORN has not been notified that we are the target of an investigation by any authorities — nor should we be,” spokesman Kevin Whelan said in a statement. “ACORN members have done a good and patriotic thing by helping bring more than a million of their fellow citizens into our democratic process.”

Republican accusations about the group were raised during Wednesday’s presidential debate between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain.

ACORN says it has registered 1.3 million young people, minorities and poor and working-class voters. More than 13,000 ACORN workers in 21 states recruited low-income voters, who tend to be Democrats.

But some ACORN employees have been accused of submitting false voter registration forms — including some signed “Mickey Mouse” or with names of other fictitious characters.

Those voter registration cards have become the focus of fraud investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least a half-dozen other states. Election officials in Ohio and North Carolina also recently questioned the group’s voter forms.

ACORN has said the “vast majority” of its workers are conscientious, but some might have turned in duplicate applications or provided fake information to pad their pay. Workers caught submitting false information have been fired, ACORN officials say.

ACORN says laws in a number of states require it to submit all registration cards it collects, even dubious ones.

WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election.

A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation. A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of inquiries in several states, including a raid on ACORN’s office in Las Vegas, for any evidence of a coordinated national effort.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations, particularly so close to an election.

Two spokesmen for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, on Thursday said the FBI has not contacted the group.

“ACORN has not been notified that we are the target of an investigation by any authorities — nor should we be,” spokesman Kevin Whelan said in a statement. “ACORN members have done a good and patriotic thing by helping bring more than a million of their fellow citizens into our democratic process.”

Republican accusations about the group were raised during Wednesday’s presidential debate between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain.

ACORN says it has registered 1.3 million young people, minorities and poor and working-class voters. More than 13,000 ACORN workers in 21 states recruited low-income voters, who tend to be Democrats.

But some ACORN employees have been accused of submitting false voter registration forms — including some signed “Mickey Mouse” or with names of other fictitious characters.

Those voter registration cards have become the focus of fraud investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least a half-dozen other states. Election officials in Ohio and North Carolina also recently questioned the group’s voter forms.

ACORN has said the “vast majority” of its workers are conscientious, but some might have turned in duplicate applications or provided fake information to pad their pay. Workers caught submitting false information have been fired, ACORN officials say.

ACORN says laws in a number of states require it to submit all registration cards it collects, even dubious ones.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/746zemwq.asp

From Little ACORNs, Big Scandals Grow
Barack Obama: torn between two models of community organizing.
by Charlotte Allen
11/03/2008, Volume 014, Issue 08

The in-your-face Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is currently being investigated for voter-registration fraud in 13 states. ACORN is often referred to as the spawn of Saul Alinsky (1909-72), the godfather of radical community organizers, whose most famous aphorism was “Keep the pressure on.” ACORN’s founders certainly had Alinsky’s principles in mind when they founded the organization in 1970.

There is a web of connections between Alinsky, ACORN, and the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. From 1985 to 1988, Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based consortium operated by several Alinsky disciples on Chicago’s poverty-plagued South Side. The DCP was imbued with Alinsky’s philosophy of helping poor people band together at the grassroots level to confront a city government that frequently neglected them. (Obama contributed to the anthology After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, touting the “impressive results” his Alinsky-inspired project had achieved.) Just before he left Chicago for Harvard Law School, Obama also went through training with the organization Alinsky founded in 1940, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), and which carries on his legacy today.

Back in Chicago in the early 1990s, Obama represented ACORN in a voter-registration suit and directed a voter-registration drive for an ACORN affiliate, Project Vote. He sat on the board of the Chicago-based Woods Foundation that made hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of grants to Project Vote and (according to a report published in an ACORN journal in 2004) ran a session on power as part of ACORN’s annual leadership training
sessions for several years before his first run for public office in 1996.

To hear it from people connected to IAF, though, Obama took an unfortunate turn when he linked himself to ACORN, whose activist shenanigans would have Alinsky spinning in his grave. These range from allegedly procuring thousands of phony and multiple signatures on voter registration lists (one 19-year-old in Cleveland claimed to have been bribed with cash and cigarettes to register 72 times over 18 months) to using taxpayer funds to strong-arm mortgage companies into lending to the un-credit-worthy, helping precipitate the current financial meltdown.

“Shakedowns” and “blackmail” were the words used by IAF’s director, Edward Chambers, a protégé of Alinsky, about ACORN and its activities when I called the IAF’s Chicago headquarters (IAF today trains organizers in a loose network of some 57 affiliates in 21 states). It was the day before the New York Times published a story about a June 18 internal report by an ACORN lawyer which contained a laundry list of “potentially improper use of charitable dollars for political purposes; money transfers among [ACORN's 174 affiliates, some of them tax-exempt, others not], and potential conflicts created by employees working for multiple affiliates,” as Times reporter Stephanie Strom put it.

One area of potential impropriety detailed in Strom’s story is the relationship between Project Vote, registered as a tax-exempt charity with the Internal Revenue Service since 1994 and thus barred from engaging in partisan political activities, and ACORN itself, a membership organization incorporated under Louisiana law that is nonprofit but not tax-exempt and is thus free to be as partisan as it wants. ACORN’s political action committee, for example, endorsed Obama in February, and the Obama campaign in turn paid an ACORN consulting affiliate, Citizens Services Inc., more than $832,000 for its work in helping Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

ACORN has a contract with Project Vote to conduct voter-registration drives using ACORN employees, who initially claimed to have signed up 1.3 million new voters at a cost of $16 million, then lowered that figure to around 450,000 (according to an October 23 New York Times story) after eliminating fraudulent registrations, duplicates, and incomplete forms. The internal report, by Washington lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley, pointed out that until very recently, Project Vote’s executive director, Zach Pollett, was also ACORN’s political director. (Pollett resigned from Project Vote in July but continues to work for the charity as a consultant via another ACORN affiliate.) Furthermore, the report noted, Project Vote has had only one independent director (who served only briefly) throughout its entire tax-exempt history. The rest of the board has consisted entirely of ACORN staffers plus two dues-paying ACORN members. Some of them told Strom they had no idea they were on the Project Vote board, which, like the boards of many ACORN affiliates, met seldom, if ever, and failed to keep minutes.

The potential for abuse in an interlocking arrangement governed top-down from New Orleans is as obvious as a thicket of “Change” signs at an Obama rally. ACORN’s using Project Vote to trawl for voters for ACORN-backed candidates–such as, um, Barack Obama–would be a clear violation of the IRS’s ban on partisan activity by a charity, as Kingsley noted in her report. Strom pointed out that ACORN is already facing demands for back taxes from the IRS and “various state tax authorities.”

ACORN
is secretive about its financial condition, which, because it is not tax-exempt, it has no legal obligation to make public. When I called ACORN’s New Orleans headquarters to ask about its funding arrangements, its press spokesman, Charles Jackson, refused to answer my questions unless I put them in writing, and after I did via email, Jackson was not heard from again. The New York Times in a 2006 article, however, stated that ACORN’s budget for that year, not counting its research spinoff and the ACORN Housing Corporation, another tax-exempt charity among ACORN’s affiliates, amounted to $37.5 million. Only $3 million of that came from the claimed 500,000 ACORN members’ dues, according to the Times story, with the rest rolling in from foundations, private donations, and arrangements called “partnerships” in which corporate targets of ACORN activism, such as the Household Financial Corporation (one of ACORN’s focuses is “predatory lending”) pay money to ACORN for the organization to operate, say, loan-counseling programs.

A Wall Street Journal article published on July 31 noted an additional source of ACORN funding: U.S. taxpayers. Journal reporters Elizabeth Williamson and Brody Mullins analyzed the IRS filings of the tax-exempt ACORN Housing Corporation for 2007 and noted that some 36 percent of the funds raised by the housing affiliate last year–$2.8 million out of $7.7 million–came from the federal government, mostly in the form of grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. (According to an October 14 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, that represented only a small part of the estimated $16 million in federal grant dollars that various ACORN affiliates bearing names such as American Institute for Social Justice and American Environmental Justice Project took in from 1997 through 2007.) Wade Rathke, ACORN’s founder and, until this past summer, CEO, writing on his blog “Chief Organizer” on June 18, the very date of Kingsley’s critical report, estimated that ACORN’s total budget for 2008, counting all affiliates, would likely be a record $110 million.

Rathke was forced out of his job at around the same time he posted his optimistic budget projection because of another eyebrow-raising matter raised in Kingsley’s report: the way ACORN hushed up the embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the organization by Rathke’s brother Dale, who headed an ACORN affiliate that provides financial-management and accounting services to other ACORN units. The theft occurred in 2000, but ACORN’s top management concealed it from both the board and law-enforcement authorities until this past May, when word leaked out at a meeting of ACORN organizers. Dale Rathke had even been allowed to keep working for ACORN, although at a reduced salary and in the lesser capacity of his brother’s assistant, while the Rathke family agreed to pay back the organization at the rate of $30,000 a year (in other words, over 30-plus years).

The Rathkes were permanent fixtures at ACORN. Wade Rathke had cut his teeth in radical activism in 1967, when he helped George Wiley found the National Welfare Rights Organization, a quintessential 1960s group that mobilized hordes of welfare mothers to invade benefits offices with lists of demands. (Melees involving overturned desks, and broken glass often resulted from these encounters.) The movement failed to impress the general public, and the National Welfare Rights Organization went bankrupt in 1975. Meanwhile, Wade Rathke had founded ACORN and soon brought his brother on board.

Once the ACORN embezzlement became public in May, however, along with the news that the Rathkes, thanks to the snail’s-pace terms of their restitution agreement, had reimbursed ACORN for only $210,000 out of the $948,000 stolen eight years ago, Dale Rathke was finally fired and Wade Rathke obliged to resign, although he continues to hold the title of chief organizer for ACORN International, yet another entity on the seemingly endless list of ACORN affiliates. Even here, Kingsley’s report revealed that the version of the embezzlement that ACORN gave out to the public this past summer differed from what her perusal of internal ACORN documents revealed. On July 8, according to the Times, ACORN’s new top executive, Bertha Lewis, had said that 90 percent of the money had come from ACORN itself and the remainder from its charity affiliates. In fact, Kingsley found, $215,000 had been charged to an American Express card paid by an ACORN pension fund that later wrote off the amount as a gift to ACORN in possible violation of federal pension-fund regulations. According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the embezzlement scandal cost ACORN, already encumbered with debt and tax problems, grants from some of its key funding foundations, and the organization has had to close several offices and lay off employees. (A friend of Wade Rathke has eased the cash-flow crisis somewhat by paying off the $738,000 the Rathkes still owed in restitution, according to the Chronicle.)

As for ACORN’s protest tactics, the kind that have netted it decades’ worth of counseling contracts and other cash handouts from corporations and municipalities, they indeed seem to fall into the category of “shakedowns.” The 2006 New York Times article was about a cadre of utility customers wearing red ACORN T-shirts who descended on the Gary office of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company to pay their heating bills out of bagfuls of pennies. The aim was to force the utility, via hours of tedious coin-counting and unpleasant media coverage, to drop delinquency penalties for tardy bill-payers with hard-luck stories. A company spokesman pointed out that the utility already had an assistance program in place for poor people unable to pay for heat and said the ACORN tactics amounted to “bullying.”

Nonetheless, such stunts, which seem to come straight from the yellowed pages of Tom Wolfe’s send-up of 1960s radical activism, “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” are remarkably effective even nearly 40 years after the Sixties officially ended. Corporate executives, bureaucratic lifers, and foundation grant-processors alike seem either cowed or impressed by such tactics as protesting a bankers’ dinner with inflated rubber sharks, piling garbage in front of city hall, or yelling profanities at a mayor’s wife and children. All of these were part of a prolonged ACORN protest in Baltimore a few years ago that, according to Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, were the likely source of an annual $50,000 payout from the city to ACORN for providing housing counseling to the poor. On the very eve of the collapse of Wachovia Bank this September–done in by its fatal investments in home-mortgage instruments that the ACORN watchdog Consumers Rights League says were pushed by ACORN itself through its taxpayer-subsidized housing affiliate–ACORN was busy trying to mau-mau Wachovia into rewriting the terms of those swiftly defaulting loans by portraying the bank to the media as a piranha lender.

The IAF’s Edward Chambers told me that scarcely any act in ACORN’s three-ring circus of urban radicalism would have met with the approval of Alinsky, the man whose ideas supposedly underlie the rubber sharks and sacks of pennies. “They take other people’s money instead of raising it from the people they’re organizing,” said Chambers. “They take federal money, money from foundations, and it corrupts them.” The IAF insists that any organization that wants to affiliate with IAF–and benefit from IAF’s training–come up with its own money, money voluntarily donated by people who believe in the group’s causes so fervently that they are willing to dip into their own pockets to pay for it. “We work a lot with churches, with unions,” said Chambers. “They hire their own organizers, and they hold them accountable. And we never endorse political candidates.”

Indeed Alinsky himself was a far more complex and idiosyncratic figure than either his disciples or his ideological opponents (who assume that his last book, Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, was all about turning yourself into another Abbie Hoffman) typically admit. Alinsky, a self-styled radical who studied at the University of Chicago and began his professional career as a union organizer, was widely accused of being a Communist, but was in fact vehemently anti-Communist. Later on, during the 1960s, he was as much a foe of Lyndon Johnson’s big-spending War on Poverty as he was of conservatives. He also detested the 1960s New Left for its antinomian cultural hedonism and its insistence on smashing the “system,” as they termed it. Alinsky believed genuine radicals ought to work within for change. “Alinsky believed that the liberal welfare state led to dependency, and that people should stand up for themselves and have the confidence to assert their own interests,” said Peter Skerry, a political scientist at Boston College.

Alinsky’s self-selected territory as a community organizer during the 1940s was Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, then a working-class slum abutting the city’s stockyards and peopled with ethnic Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks. They might have felt marginalized economically (many worked low-grade jobs in the meat-packing industry) but they remained deeply conservative socially. Most were devout Catholics, and, in order to organize them to demand better municipal services, Alinsky allied himself with Bishop Bernard Sheil and the Catholic labor organizer Joe Meegan. Later, during the 1950s, as Chicago’s meat-packing clout declined and its Eastern European ethnics moved elsewhere, Alinsky turned his attention to working-class blacks who were also socially conservative and church-oriented. Although confrontation with the prevailing establishment was a key component of Alinsky’s efforts to turn lower-class communities into effective power blocs, he had little interest in class struggle. If a movie analogy is apt, Alinsky’s ethos of activism was more On the Waterfront than Salt of the Earth.

Alinsky’s legacy organization, the IAF, has continued his practices: working with churches, trying to shore up families and other traditional institutions, and insisting on fiscal independence. They have also worked to sand down the edges of the founder’s harsh style to reposition the IAF as a service organization focused on training community organizers rather than provocation. “When I was on the board, I heard more criticism of Saul Alinsky than anything else,” recalled Jean Bethke Elshtain, a philosopher at the University of Chicago’s divinity school, and a political centrist and prolific writer associated with the “communitarian” movement of the 1980s and 1990s, who until recently served on IAF’s board of trustees. Elshtain, whom Chambers personally recruited to serve as an IAF trustee, said she had been drawn to the IAF precisely because of its commitment to “shoring up families and schools and personal responsibility.”

Because the IAF insists that its affiliates rely on grassroots contributions, not outside grants, its projects tend to be strictly local and relatively small-bore, centered around liberal Protestant and Catholic churches and their members. One of the most successful has been the Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), a consortium of churches, founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1974. COPS, the brainchild of the IAF-trained Ernesto Cortes Jr., is credited with giving political clout to San Antonio’s Mexican-Americans, who had lived in the city for decades but who had enjoyed little power under the city’s Anglo majority. Another successful IAF project is the Nehemiah Houses, which over the past 20 years has built nearly 4,000 moderate-income homes on once-desolate parcels of city-owned land in New York City. Nehemiah requires its buyers to demonstrate their commitment to home-ownership via modest but not negligible down payments, and so its projects have generally escaped the foreclosure blight that easier borrowing has brought to other low-income neighborhoods in recent years.

Some IAF undertakings, such as a successful 1994 effort to have the city of Baltimore hire only contractors who paid their employees a higher-than-minimum “living wage”–a cause later picked up by ACORN in other cities–aren’t likely to appeal to free-market conservatives who believe that the net effect of such measures is to increase unemployment by eliminating low-wage entry level jobs. Still, the IAF’s organizational emphasis on personal responsibility and commitment cannot help but resonate. “Alinsky never tried to organize the really poor; he never tried to organize welfare mothers, who are pretty hard to organize, as you might imagine; he always focused on people who had a little but wanted more,” said Skerry, whose 1993 Mexican Americans, the Ambivalent Minority told the story of Cortes and COPS.

Since the allegations of voter-registration scams surfaced in the media in September, ACORN has taken pains to distract public attention from both itself (its website blames “the right wing noise machine” for its troubles) and its connections to Obama. The effort at distancing has undoubtedly been eased by the soft spot in the hearts of many journalists for any left-of-center organization that claims to promote “social change.” Pablo Eisenberg of the Chronicle of Philanthropy covered the Rathke embezzlement and wrung his hands over the fact that ACORN’s “impressive group of smart, dedicated, and hard-working change agents” had gone wrong.

The question remains as to why Obama chose to forge close links with ACORN during the 1990s, when its rock-throwing style of community organizing had been a matter of public record for decades. After all, he could easily have returned to the lower-key, more centrist IAF. Not long before enrolling at Harvard Law School in 1988, Obama underwent IAF’s standard eight-day training session for organizers. “I was very impressed by him,” Chambers told me. “I told him that once he finished his schooling, to get back in touch with us. But he never did get back to us.”

In a September 10 article in the New Republic, John Judis described what he called the “myth” that Obama had created about the centrality of community organizing to his political philosophy. Judis quoted a primary stump speech of Obama’s declaring that community organizing was “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School” and implying that politics was for him simply community organizing by different means. The reality, noted Judis, after interviewing Obama’s mentor during the mid-1980s–the Alinsky disciple Jerry Kellman–was that Obama had long before Harvard become disillusioned with the tedium and apparent pointlessness of trying to get toilets fixed in South Side housing projects when a career in politics that law school would make possible offered him charisma, power, and glory. Power, glory–and plenty of publicity–were also ACORN’s goals and its forte.

It is not surprising that, as soon as the ink dried on Obama’s Harvard degree, the future U.S. senator forgot all about Saul Alinsky and what he stood for in order to link himself to a charisma-craving group that, at least right now, seems to be giving community organizing a bad name.

Charlotte Allen, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus website, is writing her doctoral dissertation in medieval and Byzantine studies.

Hello all you wonderful ACORN Team PUMA’s. Posting this here from this morning’s blog for you, from another PUMA. I think she is referring to a County in Florida.

p.s. when you hear the dogs barking, keep going!

~ ~ ~

Deb55 01.16.09 at 12:18 pm #16

Please have whoever is doing the research on Acorn to check out the report out of GA that there was 112,000 voters reg. in ALL 3 states, FL.,GA. and Ohio, this also was quieted very quickly. I do know for a Fact, and old TV reports will show that in Duval Co, Fl. we had 4 and 5yr old Kind. registered here. Acorn was everywhere here.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/gwinnett/stories/2008/10/23/absentee_ballot_flaw.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Gwinnett County elections officials will have to hand-copy votes from at least 10,000 absentee ballots onto new ballots that can be read by a machine.

The original ballots, designed to be filled out by hand, are flawed because of a printing error. The circle beside the candidate’s name is too thick and somewhat misshapen, and consequently an optical scanning machine won’t be able to read the votes on Election Day.

http://www.batesline.com/archives/2008/10/okie-acorn.html

Okie ACORN
By Michael Bates on October 17, 2008

Until recently, Democratic 1st District Congressional nominee Georgianna Oliver proudly boasted the endorsement of ACORN, the left-wing organization in the news recently in connection with fraudulent voter registration activities in numerous swing states. It was the top of her “professional endorsements” page. Mad Okie noticed that that endorsement had vanished for some reason, but he was able to capture a screenshot from Google’s cache. He was also able to capture the PDF directly from the website before it was removed from the oliverforcongress.com website, a brief, unsigned and undated memo on ACORN VOTES letterhead from Patricia Walker, “North Tulsa Chapter Chairperson, ACORN Votes.” The PDF file has a creation date of September 16.

The Red Dirt Report recently received an exclusive peek at an abandoned ACORN office in southern Oklahoma City:
Left hurriedly and in a shambles, the small office, coated in a layer of plaster dust, still housed computers, documents, registration forms, I-9 employment info and boxes with an IRS return address and others with a return address for an ACORN office in New Orleans.
The person working at this office, Adam Carter, had reportedly skipped town in June, according to the landlord. and in August, an ACORN representative from Tulsa came down and took more items, leaving behind what was found by Red Dirt Report. ACORN never fulfilled it’s year lease for the property and never paid a dime in rent. The landlord told Red Dirt Report that the ACORN workers seemed to attract trouble and that there was something not quite right about what they were doing. The landlord also said that the aforementioned Tulsa ACORN worker, named “Brittany,” said ACORN didn’t have any money to pay for the rent and that Carter had depleted the South Oklahoma City ACORN account….

In fact, the evidence discovered in the abandoned office on South Robinson revealed maps of Oklahoma City broken down in House districts. Districts where a Republican won, but just barely, were highlighted. Papers related to the 2006 election results for Oklahoma were also noted.

Oklahoma City radio station KTOK reported Thursday on ACORN’s brief tenure in Oklahoma City, where they attempted to get taxpayer funding for their activities:

The city received a request for the HUD money from a Matthew Eaton who represented ACORN. Internet searches reveal a Matt Eaton is the South West Development Coordinator for ACORN who described himself as an experienced grant writer and resource development coordinator. He also claimed to be ‘well versed in various forms of fund raising. “I aspire to help raise enough money so ACORN offices in the Southwest will be able to establish Tax Access and Benefit Centers in each of its neighborhood locations and to register 300,000 new voters,” wrote Eaton in a website description of himself and his goals.

But less than a year after asking for the HUD money,Eaton and the ACORN office in Oklahoma City were history. The city denied the funding request and other neighborhood agencies indicated they too had similar ‘empty’ relationships with ACORN. A spokeswoman of one such group said when they asked an ACORN official about the group’s funding, they were told it could not be discussed.
(Via Green Country Values.)

MORE: In 2007, ACORN was found to have submitted more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations in King Co., Washington.

RottenACORN.com has a list and map of fraud prosecutions involving ACORN. They seem to be fond of swing states.
Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit provides a “complete guide to ACORN voter fraud” on Pajamas Media.

At a campaign stop in Ohio, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called for the Obama-Biden campaign to disclose all communications between that campaign and ACORN. Hoft notes:
Barack Obama worked as a former trainer with the scandal-plagued ACORN organization. He also has a long history with the Far Left group and the group has canvassed for him this year. He represented ACORN in court. And, Obama donated $800,000 to the radical group just this year for their get out the vote efforts.

Earlier this week Palin told Obama to rein in this group of radical supporters.

In response, the Obama campaign is trying to pressure the FBI into dropping its investigation into voter fraud. The McCain campaign has fired back:
After a week of shifting stories and clumsy corrections regarding Barack Obama’s connections to ACORN, the Obama campaign resorted to their now-customary heavy handed tactic of attempting to criminalize political discourse. Today’s outrageous letter to Attorney General Mukasey and Special Prosecutor Dannehy at the Justice Department asking for a special prosecutor to investigate Senator McCain and Governor Palin’s public statements about ACORN’s record of fraudulent voter registrations (including in this week’s Presidential debate) is absurd. It is a typical time-worn Washington attempt to criminalize political differences. For someone who promises ‘change,’ it is certainly only more of the same.

The letter’s request that the Department of Justice investigate ‘recent partisan Republican activities throughout the country’ is almost a parody of the Obama campaign’s attempt to intimidate their political opponents. In case Sen. Obama’s lawyer did not notice, we are in the midst of a political campaign, not a coronation, and the alleged criminal activity he calls ‘recent partisan Republican activities’ are what the rest of us call campaign speeches and debates. All of this is unfortunately reminiscent of the Obama campaign’s recent creation of a ‘truth squad’ of Missouri prosecutors and sheriffs to ‘target’ people who criticize Sen. Obama. Rest assured that, despite these threats, the McCain-Palin campaign will continue to address the serious issue of voter registration fraud by ACORN and other partisan groups, and compliance by states with the Help America Vote Act’s requirement of matching new voter registrations with state data bases to prevent voter fraud.

http://www.your-inner-voice.com/fraudulentvoterregistrationforms.html

Fraudulent Voter-Registration Forms
Missouri officials find ’08 race
Well here we go again. It is the same thing we are doing in Iraqi, helping to install a democracy, a fair voting system where everybody gets a chance to vote. And you get tired of hearing about the mustard seed.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

“I don’t even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy,” Davis said. “We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don’t exist, people who have driver’s license numbers that won’t verify or Social Security numbers that won’t verify. Some have no address at all.”

The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Most polls show Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an edge in bellwether Missouri, but Democrat Barack Obama continues to put up a strong fight.

Jess Ordower, Midwest director of ACORN, said his group hasn’t done any registrations in Kansas City since late August. He said he was told three weeks ago by election officials that there were only about 135 questionable cards — 85 of them duplicates.

“They keep telling different people different things,” he said. “They gave us a list of 130, then told someone else it was 1,000.”

FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said the agency has been in contact with elections officials about potential voter fraud and plans to investigate.

“It’s a matter we take very seriously,” Patton said. “It is against the law to register someone to vote who does not fall within the parameters to vote, or to put someone on there falsely.”

On Tuesday, authorities in Nevada seized records from ACORN after finding fraudulent registration forms that included the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.

Ordower said Wednesday that ACORN registered about 53,500 people in Missouri this year. He believes his group is being targeted because some politicians don’t want that many low-income people having a voice.

“It’s par for the course,” he said. “When you’re doing more registrations than anyone else in the country, some don’t want low-income people being empowered to vote. There are pretty targeted attacks on us, but we’re proud to be out there doing the patriotic thing getting people registered to vote.”

Republicans are among ACORN’s loudest critics. At a campaign stop in Bethlehem, Pa., supporters of John McCain interrupted his remarks Wednesday by shouting, “No more ACORN.”

Debbie Mesloh, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Missouri, said in an e-mailed statement that the campaign supported any investigation of possible fraud.

According to its national Web site, the group has registered 1.3 million people nationwide for the Nov. 4 election. It also has encountered complaints of fraud stemming from registration efforts in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada and battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina, where new voter registrations have favored Democrats nearly 4 to 1 since the beginning of this year.

Missouri offers 11 electoral votes; the presidential candidates need at least 270 to win the election.

Read the entire story

“Obama’s Campaign Lies About ACORN”
“We broke the story about the Obama Campaign’s mysterious payment of more than $800,000 to Citizen Services Inc. The payments ostensibly were for “STAGING, SOUND, and LIGHTING.” A reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune, David Brown, agreed to look into the matter and was told by the Obama campaign:
http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/10/14/obamas-campaign-lies-about-acorn/

(from RBO)

“$4.19 Billion for ACORN? Only in O-Bizzarro-World would someone — anyone — NOT be able to see the absurdity of giving billions in “stimulus” money — borrowed money to be repaid through taxpayer dollars, we might add — to ACORN.”
http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/rbo-news-views-the-carnival-of-the-absurd-edition/

(scroll down to third portion)

(putting up in ACORN forum)
“Must Read: Malkin’s “Obama’s housing entitlement campaign & ACORN’s civil disobedience mob”
http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/must-read-malkins-obama%e2%80%99s-housing-entitlement-campaign-acorn%e2%80%99s-civil-disobedience-mob/

“Arrest Made in Home Foreclosure Civil Disobedience Program”

Police in Baltimore today made what is believed to be the first arrest in a civil disobedience program aimed at supporting homeowners who refuse to vacate their foreclosed homes.

An activist with ACORN — the Association of Communit Organization for Reform Now — faces criminal charges after breaking into a home in southeast Baltimore on Thursday to protest the foreclosure crisis sweeping the country.

“This is our house now,” ACORN member Louis Beverly reportedly said after cutting a lock with bolt cutters at the home.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,498669,00.html

From ACORN/Jobs With Justice rally today in Orlando to push “historic budget” to worldwide demonstrations for “global social justice” (Updated)
http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/from-acornjobs-with-justice-rally-today-in-orlando-to-push-historic-budget-to-worldwide-demonstrations-for-global-social-justice/

Hi Pumas! Another fly by posting. Just heard on Fox that O’Reilly’s suggestion to Bobby Jindal of Louisiana (ACORN headquarters there?) to investigate ACORN may have had an effect. Apparently LA attorney Buddy Caldwell has said that the Public Corruption and Special Prosecution unit is looking into ACORN and its affiliates. They have set up a phone line for anyone with information about ACORN to call 225-326-6120. Let’s talk about this before we encourage anyone to call – any concerns? Will cross post on the Investigating ACORN thread.

BI and Fla Police arrest 11 A.C.O.R.N. workers for voter fraud
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/278958

The FBI and Florida law enforcement officials arrested 11 individuals who were associated with The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) for voter fraud relating to the 2008 election.
…
Those arrested are accused of falsifying almost 900 voter registration cards in Miami-Dade County last year.

Good job, Headclunker.

Former Acorn Organizer Accused Of $500K Fraud
http://gothamist.com/2009/12/02/former_acorn_organizer_accused_of_f.php