Voter fraud charges still tripping up voting rights group
ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
Associated PressAn advocacy group that registered more than a million voters two years ago is facing new allegations of voter fraud and sloppy work just weeks before crucial midterm elections.
Philadelphia's municipal voter registration office has rejected about 3,000 cards submitted by ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - since April because of missing information or invalid addresses.
Denver County election officials forwarded about 200 cards to the secretary of state's office after finding similar handwriting on signatures.
In Ohio, election officials in three of the state's largest counties have cited problems with hundreds of voter registration cards. ACORN is accused of submitting cards with nonexistent addresses, forged signatures and, in one case, for someone who died seven years ago.
"In my opinion, there's a lot of words but little action in terms of fixing the problem," said Matt Damschroder, elections board director in Franklin County, Ohio.
ACORN, which has about 220,000 members nationally, registered 1.2 million people to vote in 2004 and is running voter registration drives in 17 states this year.
The nonprofit group dispatches workers and volunteers to poor neighborhoods, gas stations, courthouses and other places to sign up new voters.
Although it is nonpartisan, ACORN recruits new voters in heavily Democratic poor and minority neighborhoods. The group says those areas are the most underrepresented in the political process. Republicans are among ACORN's loudest critics, while Democrats largely support its work. In July, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, addressed the group's national convention in Columbus.
Democrats hope to regain control of the U.S. House and narrow or erase the GOP majority in the Senate on Nov. 7.
ACORN was accused of fraud in 2004 in Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia, and in 2003 in Missouri.
Prosecution is rare, though, and federal lawsuits against the group were dismissed in Florida. ACORN says it's working to reduce problems, and officials promise to fire any worker found committing fraud.
"We'll continue to personally encourage people to register to vote and exercise their franchise, and we're going to continue to stand up for people's voter rights," said Kevin Whelan, a spokesman for the New Orleans-based group.
Such statements do little to appease critics. Even groups supporting the organization's efforts question why fraud allegations keep cropping up.
"They're sort of their own worst enemy," said Bill Faith, who directs Ohio's largest homeless advocacy group and shares many of ACORN's goals.
"They want low-income people to register to vote but because of the kind of problems that come from their program, it provokes a reaction from the Legislature that actually makes it harder to run such programs," Faith said.
The Denver Election Commission says it's been unsuccessful in working with ACORN to reduce problems with voter registration cards. Colorado officials had investigated similar concerns about the group's registration cards two years ago.
ACORN says it meets regularly with election officials to address concerns.
"We hold our workers to a very high standard, we ensure they make every vote count, and we're going to continue to do that work," said Ben Hanna, head organizer in Colorado.
Ohio prosecutors are looking at almost 400 cards that the Franklin County elections board says included already registered voters or listed the wrong address.
The Franklin elections board is also looking at hundreds of other ACORN cards with alleged irregularities. The Hamilton County board is concerned about errors and missing information on hundreds of ACORN cards, while problems with about a dozen cards were reported in Summit County.
ACORN is continuing its largely successful legal campaign to reduce voting obstacles for the poor.
In September, a federal judge in Ohio threw out a requirement that individuals who register voters - instead of groups - must turn in the completed forms, in a lawsuit brought by ACORN and other voting rights groups.
ACORN won a preliminary victory Thursday in a similar suit against Georgia's voter registration laws. It won a similar case in Washington state this year and in Maryland last year.
ACORN Is A Bad Seed
Something’s rotten in the state of New Mexico, and Ohio, and Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and Florida, and…
ACORN says it is a community group, but it is really a multi-million-dollar, multinational conglomerate. Its political agenda is driven by a relative handful of anti-corporate activists. ACORN spends millions of dollars to promote economic policies (like raising the minimum wage), but has admitted that it doesn't always want to abide by them. ACORN advocates for workers' rights and runs two unions, but has in the past fought its own employees' efforts to form a union.
ACORN's history makes for pretty interesting reading. The Clinton Administration found that ACORN was misspending government grants designed to help counsel the poor. Although it seeks minimum wage increases in cities and states across the country -- ACORN sued the state of California to get out of paying its own employees the state minimum wage.
ACORN's practices have corrupted our political process as well. It has engaged in questionable election activities for years—stretching back even to the organization's founding years in Arkansas . In recent years, as its political power has increased, so have instances of fraud.
In the past few years, it has been investigated for election fraud in at least a dozen states. Want examples?
In Florida, ACORN employees filed a false voter registration form for 68-year-old former St. Petersburg Democratic mayor Charles Schuh – amazingly, they registered him as a 30-year-old Republican woman. In Ohio, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group. In Colorado, two ex-ACORN employees were convicted of turning in false registrations. The list goes on.
Just last year, in an effort to put a wage initiative on the ballot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ACORN employee's forged thousands of fraudulent signatures . The group is involved in initiative efforts in a half-dozen states this year. How many thousands of signatures will they forge to forward their agenda?
It's time to send a message to ACORN. It is time to end the corruption.
ACORN’s Voter Fraud in Ohio is Part of Larger Pattern
New report shows ACORN has been linked to voter fraud in 12 states including Ohio 8/11/06,
Washington, DC –ACORN’s recent run-in with the Franklin County elections board for allegedly turning in falsified voter registration cards is only the latest in a long-standing pattern of dubious elections practices. ACORN employees have been accused of submitting bogus voter registration cards and forging signatures on ballot initiatives in 12 states since 2004.
In addition to Ohio, ACORN employees have been accused of illegal elections practices in New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia among others. Here are just a few examples of ACORN’s pattern and practice of fraud associated with their campaigns:
Florida—When ACORN led a ballot initiative to raise Florida’s minimum wage in 2004, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesman said ACORN was “singled out” among suspected voter registration groups because it was “the common thread” in the agency’s investigations from one end of the state to the other. One blatant example of voter fraud includes registering 68-year-old Charles Shuh, a former Democratic mayor of St. Petersburg, as a 30-year-old female Republican.
New Mexico—In an effort to put a wage initiative on the ballot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2005 ACORN employees forged thousands of fraudulent signatures. Following their voter registration drive in 2004, a state Representative stated that ACORN was “manufacturing voters” throughout New Mexico.
Ohio—This is not the first time ACORN has been accused of shady practices in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County in 2004, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group.
“Once again ACORN is using any means necessary to fool the public into supporting its radical political agenda,” said Mike Flynn, EPI’s director of legislative affairs. “ACORN’s decades of questionable elections practices and outright deceit extending throughout a dozen states prove this group is more about advancing its political agenda than about helping the community.”
To see an example of the fraudulent signatures ACORN submitted for their ballot initiative to raise Albuquerque’s minimum wage or to read the report “Rotten ACORN: America’s Bad Seed,” go to www.RottenACORN.com.
The Acorn Indictments
A union-backed outfit faces charges of election fraud.
Friday, November 3, 2006 12:01 a.m. ESTSo, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board. But hey, who needs voter ID laws?
We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement that "This national investigation is very much ongoing."
Let's hope so. Acorn officials bill themselves as nonpartisan community organizers merely interested in giving a voice to minorities and the poor. In reality, Acorn is a union-backed, multimillion-dollar outfit that uses intimidation and other tactics to push for higher minimum wage mandates and to trash Wal-Mart and other non-union companies.Operating in at least 38 states (as well as Canada and Mexico), Acorn pushes a highly partisan agenda, and its organizers are best understood as shock troops for the AFL-CIO and even the Democratic Party. As part of the Fannie Mae reform bill, House Democrats pushed an "affordable housing trust fund" designed to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits to subsidize Acorn, among other groups. A version of this trust fund actually passed the Republican House and will surely be on the agenda again next year.
Acorn and its affiliates have pulled some real stunts in recent years. In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn's practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.
"You have to wonder what's the point of that, if not to overwhelm the system and get phony registrations on the voter rolls," says Thor Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights, who also testified at the hearing. "These were Democratic officials saying that they felt their election system in Ohio was under assault by these kinds of efforts to game the system."Given this history, it's not surprising that Acorn is so hostile to voter identification laws and other efforts to ensure fairness and accuracy at the polls. In Missouri last month, the state Supreme Court held that a photo ID requirement to vote was overly burdensome and a violation of the state constitution. Acorn was behind the original suit challenging the statute, and it has brought similar challenges in several other states, including Ohio.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that blacks today are almost twice as likely as they were in 2004 to say they have little or no confidence in the voting system. Such a finding would seem like a powerful argument for voter ID laws, which consistently poll well among people of all races and incomes and would increase confidence in the voting process. Of course, voter ID laws would also cut down on fraud, which, judging from the latest indictments, would put a real crimp in Acorn's style.
Amen, brother, Amen.H/T to A.J. Strata at The Strata-Sphere.
Looks like the nuts over at ACORN now have been caught in Pennsylvania again committing election fraud with phony voter registration forms.
From Delaware County in the Keystone State comes this story:
Question: If your last name were Abortion would you name any of your children Alternative? Probably not! So a more pertinent question is this: If you saw the name Alternative Abortion on a voter registration form, complete with an address and a social security number, you’d be suspicious, right?
You’d think somebody was playing a tasteless joke. Or maybe even committing a crime, because that’s what fraudulently filling out a voter registration form is, a crime.
This one is currently under investigation by Delaware County District Attorney’s office, along with hundreds of other suspicious voter registration forms turned into the county voter registration commission.
Not dozens. Not scores. But hundreds!
“If not thousands,” says county Solicitor John McBlain.
So far, the county has found more than 100 people who have told investigators and/or signed affidavits claiming someone wrongly tried to register to vote in their name. Another 542 registration forms were identified as having phony addresses and some 1,200 to 1,300 more also appear to be fraudulent.
What’s most interesting about this is that one organization submitted every single one of the near 2,000 registrations that are suspected or proven frauds.
That group is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, otherwise known as ACORN.
ACORN is not, as it claims, a nonpartisan group involved in improving education and helping communities. ACORN has been involved in minimum wage increase proposals, Wal-Mart bashing, advocating government-run health care and is a leftwing activist group which has been involved in numerous shady activities regarding voter registration all across the country.
Just last week, four ACORN workers were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms in Kansas City, Mo. ACORN people have already been convicted in Colorado and Wisconsin and more are under investigation here and in Ohio.
Late last month, Delaware County Assistant District Attorney Joe Brielmann sent out a press release warning residents to be on the lookout for this sort of fraud and identity theft.
Of the four ACORN workers under investigation by county detectives, two are convicted felons (one a drug dealer, the other a convicted rapist.) Who better to help work for social justice in our communities?
By law, convicted felons cannot vote and cannot register voters. ACORN knows this, yet time and time again we see convicted felons filing phony voter registration cards, registering such names as “Mary Poppins,” “Dick Tracy” and “Jeffrey Dahmer” to vote, all from the same address in the same handwriting with the same signature.
Every time one of those fictitious people votes — or an illegal alien, or a convicted felon, or a dead person, for that matter — it makes my legitimate vote — and yours too — worthless.
If you go out and vote for Candidate A and I go vote for Candidate B, you didn’t render my vote worthless, nor mine yours, because we both legally participated in the process. But if Jose who snuck across the border and got a consular ID illegally from Voces de la Frontera and then used that consular ID to illegally obtain a state driver’s license which was used to illegally register to vote votes for Candidate A, then my vote is meaningless.
Same thing when the cemetery precincts all show up to vote. Same thing when the Racine Correctional Institution precincts, and so on. Notice they all vote Democrat — even the dead Republicans.
It’s high time the Attorney General and the Justice Department look at a federal prosecution of ACORN under any existing laws. This is clearly a nationwide campaign to commit election fraud. ACORN leaders are aware it’s happening and at least tacitly condone it, if not participate in and encourage it.
If the federal government can use RICO to go after protesters at abortion clinics, perhaps RICO might be applied here as well. The election fraudsters are a much bigger threat to our freedom than some protesters at an abortion clinic.
Big deals send up red flags
Sales of 14 upscale homes at well-above-market prices raise suspicions of flipping
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Geoff DuttonThe peculiar but tempting offers sometimes came a year or more after homeowners planted for-sale signs in their front yards.
Interested buyers suddenly appeared, proposing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price for houses in some of central Ohio’s elite neighborhoods, including Muirfield Village and Tartan Fields.
The catch: the sellers must agree to immediately refund the difference between the asking price and the sale price.
At least 14 such deals worth more than $11 million have closed since spring, and the offers continue.
Rather than celebrate, some suspicious realestate brokers, lawyers and title agents advised sellers to reject the offers and walk away from the deals.
Some called the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, because most of the buyers were Middle Eastern.
"We turned down five of them," said Bryan Wing, executive vice president of CV Perry Builders. "Believe me, in this day and age, we could have used it." Others couldn’t resist.
The elusive buyers who could be located by The Dispatch offered little if any explanation. The real-estate professionals, two of whom have troubled track records, wouldn’t discuss the sales in detail. Bankers holding the mortgages wouldn’t talk, and neither would FBI or Homeland Security officials.
With few people talking, and a limited public paper trail, key details remain a mystery. But some observers fear the worst — that dealmakers might abandon the houses and disappear with the mortgage money, leaving neighbors and lenders to sort out the mess.
I'm not so worried about the rich folk having abandoned houses in their neighborhood. I'm interested to see where the money is going. Hezbollah? Hamas? Al Queda? The Muslim Brotherhood?
I'm sure the FBI will say it's just a coincidence. Move along. Nothing to see here. After all, they've had muslim sensitivity training.
This is a similar story that is appearing over and over again. Middle eastern-descent families move here to make their fortune, then send money back to their country of origin or give it to an islamic charity.
Follow the money. It could be that these people are simply hucksters and con men that have a found a gaping hole in Ohio's mortgage lending laws and are taking advantage of it (like so many others). Or, they could be terror financiers. Only time will tell.
Read the complete story here.
