It should be noted that this group engaged in voter fraud in the past in at least two cities - Kansas City and St. Louis - where convictions of ACORN activists were returned ON GUILTY PLEAS. They admitted it.
When the group has a history of this, how can people just look at current activity and say, "Just allegations."
http://www.nlpc.org/view.asp?action=viewArticle&aid=2048
http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/pol/864043849.html
by Michelle Malkin:
http://m.nypost.com/ms/p/nyp/nyp/view.m?pid=23772&storyid=132618
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 groups announced the wrap-up of a 21-state voter-registration drive targeting low-income people and minorities in such battleground states as Ohio, Pennyslvania, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
What's wrong with that? For starters, these two groups are militantly partisan outfits purporting to engage in nonpartisan activity. And their campaign comes amid an avalanche of fresh voter-fraud allegations involving ACORN in many of those same states.
ACORN has helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. It gets 40 percent of its revenues from the taxpayers, with the rest coming from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance.
Lefty lawyer Sandy Newman founded Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, 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. Despite his denials of any association with the group, Obama's political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda.
As I've noted previously ("ACORN: O's Ugly Ally," June 26), Obama trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN's PAC endorsed him in this year's Democratic primaries back in February.
And Newman hired Obama in 1992 to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The effort's motto: "It's a Power Thing." Today, the Obama campaign's "Vote for Change" registration drive is running in parallel with ACORN/Project Vote, targetting the same sorts of people.
It's 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, "is going to be enormous."
Quantity over quality. That's the ACORN way - and the fraud allegations keep piling up:
* Yesterday, Nevada officials raided ACORN's Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names. Among the bogus monikers: names of former Dallas Cowboys players.
* Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected thousands of registration forms ACORN had turned in from its drives this summer. On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 of the applications were no good - tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen.
In what seems to be ACORN's standard operating procedure, vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from phone books and forged signatures. According to a local paper (the Northwest Indiana and Illionois Times), "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 include dead people and underage kids.
* Milwaukee, Wisc., officials last month discovered at least seven felons employed as voter-registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. (State law bans felons from such work.) They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter-registration cards. The state GOP accuses the group of trying to get dead, imprisoned or imaginary people on the 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. The Miami Herald reports: "One individual had 21 duplicate applications."
Election officials had flagged ACORN's negligent practices 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 - a fifth of all new voters in that region.
* In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people got free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling in some prospects. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who said 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 Democrat power base. Rules be damned.
-- Modified on 10/8/2008 8:14:42 PM
"Election officials had flagged ACORN's negligent practices 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 - a fifth of all new voters in that region."
Ms. Malkin's allegation here that the number ACORN registered was 60 percent democratic, and therefore it must be fraudulent. Meanwhile, is the that 60 percent of democrats a fifth of new voters, the Democratic and Republican registrants together, or the 20 percent of Democrats above Republicans? Ms. Malkin should think twice before calling ACORN negligent.
And so it goes. Obviously there's some fraud, but just as obviously, Republicans have and will fraudulently purge people from the voting rolls, and will target minorities while doing it. They will also have and will tamper with voting machines.
Republicans are just angry that they can't register new Republican voters. Their source of votes is dry. They can't do a voting drive and expect people will sign up with them.
For a political party, it's what's known as death.
Registering homeless people: if you're going to commit fraud, there's a lot easier ways of doing it. They were registering real people, who should have a voice and vote.
"Milwaukee, Wisc., officials last month discovered at least seven felons employed as voter-registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. (State law bans felons from such work.) They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter-registration cards. The state GOP accuses the group of trying to get dead, imprisoned or imaginary people on the voter rolls."
Let's see what's missing here: there's a "raft of problematic voter registration cards." How many cards in a raft? Plus, the GOP accuses them. Well, that's proof.
-- Modified on 10/8/2008 10:00:54 PM
"That was Chicago politics," said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. "Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/29/obamas.first.campaign/
It's exactly the move that you described here that makes me believe that Obama is a remarkable politician. He's clever and he's self-assured.
I can't say that "destroying his enemies" is the same as challenging petitions to keep them off the ballot. I thought "destroying" was more like sending them to death camps. You should recognize when a source exaggerates that broadly.
-- Modified on 10/8/2008 10:51:40 PM
-- Modified on 10/8/2008 10:38:35 PM
It appears that conservatives are taking every advantage of that convenience-- with no effect.
I think that it clearly demonstrates how tough Barack Obama actually is. There has been a lot of talk about his lack of toughness and whether he has the ability to stand up to the likes of Vladamir Putin. I think we can put that to rest.
He took on the heavyweight Clinton political machine and defeated it, something the Republican party could never to. He effectively took over the mantle of leadership within the Democratic party by ensuring that the convention rules favored his agenda and his position as the Presidential nominee over the Clinton's objections. And he did it all while looking like a unifier of the party.
This man knows how to lead and he knows how to play the game of politics. Furthermore, he knows how to surround himself with competent people that can help him lead effective. I don't believe I've ever seen a Presidential campaign run so effectively and stay upon message.
Politics is a game of hardball...John McCain learned it personally in 2000 when the Bush campaign smeared him into defeat. I'm sure that everyone knows this on this board as well. So not to marginalize your post...but I don't see your point.
Thanks
Everything is always an allegation until the trial. Furthermore, even when a trial ends in an acquittal it does not mean innocence, only a reasonable doubt. It can still be "true" to a preponderence of the evidence, which is morel likely than not, but it will forever be an "allegation."
Acorn has a pattern of this that is really terrible.
The Dems were pissing in their pants with "Make every vote count."
Every fraudulent vote makes one legitimate vote "not count." But that doesn't seem to be too much of a problem.
It doesn't matter if there will be a trial. History often judges events without a trial and/or contrary to findings at a trial.
Al Capone was never convicted of anything but tax evasion, but you would have to be silly to think that everything else was "only allegations."
In three, five, or ten years historians will be going through documents. The boxes of votor regisrations will be in a basement somewhere in Ohio. They will find that Mick Jagger registered to vote 20 times. They will find that Donald Mouse was registered in 10 counties. They will find that 500 dead people voted in X county.
This is what happened in Texas in all of Johnson's elections.
As with those elections, the conclusion will be that the vote heavily influenced by fraud, and it will be a good TV movie. But it won't change the result.
There are few clean elections on this planet.
Luckily in America there won't be a gun battle involved in picking the winner.
It should be noted that this group engaged in voter fraud in the past in at least two cities - Kansas City and St. Louis - where convictions of ACORN activists were returned ON GUILTY PLEAS. They admitted it.
When the group has a history of this, how can people just look at current activity and say, "Just allegations."
http://www.nlpc.org/view.asp?action=viewArticle&aid=2048
http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/pol/864043849.html