Voters say they were duped into registering as Republicans

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"I am not a Republican," insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet clinic manager from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. "I certainly . . . won't sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again."

YPM, a group hired by the GOP, allegedly deceived Californians who thought they were signing a petition. YPM denies any wrongdoing. Similar accusations have been leveled against the company elsewhere.

By Evan Halper and Michael Rothfeld

Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

SACRAMENTO — Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country.

Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed.

"I am not a Republican," insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet-clinic manager and former Democrat from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. "I certainly . . . won't sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again."

It is a bait-and-switch scheme familiar to election experts. The firm hired by the California Republican Party -- a small company called Young Political Majors, or YPM, which operates in several states -- has been accused of using the tactic across the country.

Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit. Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Ventura counties say they are investigating complaints about the company.

The firm, which a Republican Party spokesman said is paid $7 to $12 for each registration it secures, has denied any wrongdoing and says it has never been charged with a crime.

The 70,000 voters YPM has registered for the Republican Party this year will help combat the public perception that it is struggling amid Democratic gains nationally, give a boost to fundraising efforts and bolster member support for party leaders, political strategists from both parties say.

Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.

Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.

The Times randomly interviewed 46 of the hundreds of voters whose election records show they were recently re-registered as Republicans by YPM, and 37 of them -- more than 80% -- said that they were misled into making the change or that it was done without their knowledge.

Lydia Laws, a Palm Springs retiree, said she was angry to find recently that her registration had been switched from Democrat to Republican.

Laws said the YPM staffer who instructed her to identify herself on a petition as a Republican assured her that it was a formality, and that her registration would not be changed. Later, a card showed up in the mail saying she had joined the GOP.

"I said, 'No, no, no. That's not right,' " Laws said.

It all sounds familiar to Beverly Hill, a Democrat and the former election supervisor in Florida's Alachua County. About 200 voters -- mostly college students -- were unwittingly registered as Republicans there in 2004 by YPM staffers using the same tactic, Hill said.

"It is just incredible that this can keep happening election after election," she said.

YPM and Republican Party officials said they were surprised by the complaints. The officials said the signature gatherers wear shirts bearing the Republican symbol, an elephant -- a contention disputed by some of the voters interviewed.

Every person registered signs an affidavit confirming they voluntarily joined the GOP, party leaders said.

"It does the state party no good to register people in a party they don't want to be in," said Hector Barajas, communications director for the California Republican Party.

The document that voters thought was an initiative petition has no legal implications at all. YPM founder Mark Jacoby said the petition was clearly labeled as a "plebiscite," which does nothing more than show public support.

He also said that plainclothes investigators for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, have conducted multiple spot checks and told his firm it is doing nothing improper.

"Every time, they gave us a thumbs-up," Jacoby said. "People are not being tricked."

But Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, said the agency "does not give an OK or seal of approval to voter registration groups."

Two years ago, Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas charged 12 workers for a petitioning firm hired by the local Republican Party with fraudulently registering voters as Republican.

Democratic registration drives have also caught the attention of law enforcement officials.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a national nonprofit that recruits mostly Democratic voters, is being investigated by the FBI for filing fake registrations in multiple states during the current presidential campaign.

In April, eight ACORN officials in St. Louis pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards in 2006.

In California, signature-gatherers are prohibited by law from misleading voters about what they are signing.

"You can't lie to someone to procure their signature," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in election law.

Civil rights activists recently filed a lawsuit in Arizona accusing YPM of deceiving residents to get signatures for a ballot measure that would have prohibited affirmative action by that state. The lawsuit was dropped after supporters of the measure pulled it from the ballot.

In Massachusetts, former YPM worker Angela McElroy testified at a legislative hearing in 2004that she had tricked voters into signing a ballot measure to ban gay marriage. She said she told voters they were signing in favor of a measure to allow alcoholic drinks to be sold in supermarkets.

YPM's Jacoby said McElroy was on loan to another signature-gathering company at the time the alleged deception took place.

Jose Aguilera, a 48-year-old math teacher from Ventura whose registration was recently changed from Democrat to Republican, said he signed the child-molester petition outside an Albertsons supermarket.

He said he was asked to sign a second document but not told that it would change his registration.

"Somehow the guy pulled out something else and I signed it," he said.

Ashcraft, the pet-clinic manager, said she knew that she could still vote in November for whichever presidential candidate she supports -- in her case, Democrat Barack Obama.

"I just don't like being lied to," she said.

Janett Lemaire, 54, said she told a signature-gatherer in the small Riverside County town of Desert Edge, "I've been a Democrat all my life and I want to stay that way."

But the man "said this has nothing to do with changing how you are registered," Lemaire said. "Then I get a notice in the mail saying I am a Republican. . . . I was very angry."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fr...story?track=rss

[Pooky 3,784]

"I am not a Republican," insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet clinic manager from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. "I certainly . . . won't sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again."

YPM, a group hired by the GOP, allegedly deceived Californians who thought they were signing a petition. YPM denies any wrongdoing. Similar accusations have been leveled against the company elsewhere.

By Evan Halper and Michael Rothfeld

Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

SACRAMENTO — Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country.

Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed.

"I am not a Republican," insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet-clinic manager and former Democrat from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. "I certainly . . . won't sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again."

It is a bait-and-switch scheme familiar to election experts. The firm hired by the California Republican Party -- a small company called Young Political Majors, or YPM, which operates in several states -- has been accused of using the tactic across the country.

Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit. Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Ventura counties say they are investigating complaints about the company.

The firm, which a Republican Party spokesman said is paid $7 to $12 for each registration it secures, has denied any wrongdoing and says it has never been charged with a crime.

The 70,000 voters YPM has registered for the Republican Party this year will help combat the public perception that it is struggling amid Democratic gains nationally, give a boost to fundraising efforts and bolster member support for party leaders, political strategists from both parties say.

Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.

Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.

The Times randomly interviewed 46 of the hundreds of voters whose election records show they were recently re-registered as Republicans by YPM, and 37 of them -- more than 80% -- said that they were misled into making the change or that it was done without their knowledge.

Lydia Laws, a Palm Springs retiree, said she was angry to find recently that her registration had been switched from Democrat to Republican.

Laws said the YPM staffer who instructed her to identify herself on a petition as a Republican assured her that it was a formality, and that her registration would not be changed. Later, a card showed up in the mail saying she had joined the GOP.

"I said, 'No, no, no. That's not right,' " Laws said.

It all sounds familiar to Beverly Hill, a Democrat and the former election supervisor in Florida's Alachua County. About 200 voters -- mostly college students -- were unwittingly registered as Republicans there in 2004 by YPM staffers using the same tactic, Hill said.

"It is just incredible that this can keep happening election after election," she said.

YPM and Republican Party officials said they were surprised by the complaints. The officials said the signature gatherers wear shirts bearing the Republican symbol, an elephant -- a contention disputed by some of the voters interviewed.

Every person registered signs an affidavit confirming they voluntarily joined the GOP, party leaders said.

"It does the state party no good to register people in a party they don't want to be in," said Hector Barajas, communications director for the California Republican Party.

The document that voters thought was an initiative petition has no legal implications at all. YPM founder Mark Jacoby said the petition was clearly labeled as a "plebiscite," which does nothing more than show public support.

He also said that plainclothes investigators for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, have conducted multiple spot checks and told his firm it is doing nothing improper.

"Every time, they gave us a thumbs-up," Jacoby said. "People are not being tricked."

But Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, said the agency "does not give an OK or seal of approval to voter registration groups."

Two years ago, Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas charged 12 workers for a petitioning firm hired by the local Republican Party with fraudulently registering voters as Republican.

Democratic registration drives have also caught the attention of law enforcement officials.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a national nonprofit that recruits mostly Democratic voters, is being investigated by the FBI for filing fake registrations in multiple states during the current presidential campaign.

In April, eight ACORN officials in St. Louis pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards in 2006.

In California, signature-gatherers are prohibited by law from misleading voters about what they are signing.

"You can't lie to someone to procure their signature," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in election law.

Civil rights activists recently filed a lawsuit in Arizona accusing YPM of deceiving residents to get signatures for a ballot measure that would have prohibited affirmative action by that state. The lawsuit was dropped after supporters of the measure pulled it from the ballot.

In Massachusetts, former YPM worker Angela McElroy testified at a legislative hearing in 2004that she had tricked voters into signing a ballot measure to ban gay marriage. She said she told voters they were signing in favor of a measure to allow alcoholic drinks to be sold in supermarkets.

YPM's Jacoby said McElroy was on loan to another signature-gathering company at the time the alleged deception took place.

Jose Aguilera, a 48-year-old math teacher from Ventura whose registration was recently changed from Democrat to Republican, said he signed the child-molester petition outside an Albertsons supermarket.

He said he was asked to sign a second document but not told that it would change his registration.

"Somehow the guy pulled out something else and I signed it," he said.

Ashcraft, the pet-clinic manager, said she knew that she could still vote in November for whichever presidential candidate she supports -- in her case, Democrat Barack Obama.

"I just don't like being lied to," she said.

Janett Lemaire, 54, said she told a signature-gatherer in the small Riverside County town of Desert Edge, "I've been a Democrat all my life and I want to stay that way."

But the man "said this has nothing to do with changing how you are registered," Lemaire said. "Then I get a notice in the mail saying I am a Republican. . . . I was very angry."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fr...story?track=rss

A lame non-story from the Democrats this time.

This does not even compare to the ACORN scandal that is ongoing. Acorn is actively submitting fraudulent voter registrations (then advising the authorities that some might be fraudulent, but they haven't checked and discarded them - CYA +).

This is just people NOT READING WHAT THEY'RE SIGNING.

Trying to equate the two is reaching just a bit, don't you think?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

A lame non-story from the Democrats this time.

This does not even compare to the ACORN scandal that is ongoing. Acorn is actively submitting fraudulent voter registrations (then advising the authorities that some might be fraudulent, but they haven't checked and discarded them - CYA +).

This is just people NOT READING WHAT THEY'RE SIGNING.

Trying to equate the two is reaching just a bit, don't you think?

On the surface, this story may look like ####### for tat, but the issues are unrelated. Secondly, ACORN has not committed fraud nor have they engaged in voter fraud. The whole hoopla over ACORN is a tried and true Republican tactic to suppress voters and nothing more. Anyone can go into their local DMV office, grab a voter registration form and fill it out, with whatever name and info they feel like using, albeit they would be committing voter registration fraud. People, like those working for ACORN, who collect voter registration forms simply let people fill out the forms. It is not their legal responsibility to verify the accuracy of the information. You don't even have to show them ID. So calling ACORN or any voter registrating organization fraudulent is dishonest at best and in an election year, perpetuating a deliberate lie.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

A lame non-story from the Democrats this time.

This does not even compare to the ACORN scandal that is ongoing. Acorn is actively submitting fraudulent voter registrations (then advising the authorities that some might be fraudulent, but they haven't checked and discarded them - CYA +).

This is just people NOT READING WHAT THEY'RE SIGNING.

Trying to equate the two is reaching just a bit, don't you think?

On the surface, this story may look like ####### for tat, but the issues are unrelated. Secondly, ACORN has not committed fraud nor have they engaged in voter fraud. The whole hoopla over ACORN is a tried and true Republican tactic to suppress voters and nothing more. Anyone can go into their local DMV office, grab a voter registration form and fill it out, with whatever name and info they feel like using, albeit they would be committing voter registration fraud. People, like those working for ACORN, who collect voter registration forms simply let people fill out the forms. It is not their legal responsibility to verify the accuracy of the information. You don't even have to show them ID. So calling ACORN or any voter registrating organization fraudulent is dishonest at best and in an election year, perpetuating a deliberate lie.

Steven, you have issues.

People involved with ACORN have already admitted to committing fraud by filling out multiple voter registration forms themselves, not simply collecting forms filled out by others, as you claim. It's matters little that anyone here calls ACORN fraudulant; state and federal authorities are doing so, ignore that, as is your choice. ACORN is engaging in voter suppression by attempting to make it look as tho Dimocrats outnumber Republicans just as their cohorts are also trying to discourage conservative voters by insisting that Obama can't lose, and, in fact, has already won the election.

Personally, I'm totally against duping people into being Republicans on paper. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Anyone who is so stupid and easily duped that they sign papers without knowing what they are signing should definitely be a **; they've proven themselves to be down to the task.

Edited October 18, 2008 by Virtual wife

[Pooky 3,784]

A lame non-story from the Democrats this time.

This does not even compare to the ACORN scandal that is ongoing. Acorn is actively submitting fraudulent voter registrations (then advising the authorities that some might be fraudulent, but they haven't checked and discarded them - CYA +).

This is just people NOT READING WHAT THEY'RE SIGNING.

Trying to equate the two is reaching just a bit, don't you think?

On the surface, this story may look like ####### for tat, but the issues are unrelated. Secondly, ACORN has not committed fraud nor have they engaged in voter fraud. The whole hoopla over ACORN is a tried and true Republican tactic to suppress voters and nothing more. Anyone can go into their local DMV office, grab a voter registration form and fill it out, with whatever name and info they feel like using, albeit they would be committing voter registration fraud. People, like those working for ACORN, who collect voter registration forms simply let people fill out the forms. It is not their legal responsibility to verify the accuracy of the information. You don't even have to show them ID. So calling ACORN or any voter registrating organization fraudulent is dishonest at best and in an election year, perpetuating a deliberate lie.

And your story is personal stupidity. Read what you are about to sign. End of.

ACORN is not an irrelevance, as postal ballots don't require voters to be present 50 or so times at the polling station. If it is just a GOP distraction, why is the prarctice of obtaining fraudulent voter registrations perpetuated by so many ACORN offices in so many states. Why would they leave themselves open to such charges in the first place? Surely the best way to rise above suspicion is to vet the registrations they collect before they are submitted, not report that some of the ones they submit may be fraudulent and hope the voter monitoring catches them?

And ACORN is certainly not an irrelevance to the American electorate. Just because the media has blown it off as a "GOP" tactic doesn't mean that people haven't formed their own opinion and from what I hear, they don't buy the media whitewash. There is too much of it going on to be just a coincidence and the links back to the Democrat candidate do nothing to help change the perception that there is something dodgy afoot here.

So, before you dismiss the issue with ACORN as don and dusted, look beyond the media sources you rely on and take in what others are saying. You'll find a different picture if you look at both sides.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

A lame non-story from the Democrats this time.

This does not even compare to the ACORN scandal that is ongoing. Acorn is actively submitting fraudulent voter registrations (then advising the authorities that some might be fraudulent, but they haven't checked and discarded them - CYA +).

This is just people NOT READING WHAT THEY'RE SIGNING.

Trying to equate the two is reaching just a bit, don't you think?

On the surface, this story may look like ####### for tat, but the issues are unrelated. Secondly, ACORN has not committed fraud nor have they engaged in voter fraud. The whole hoopla over ACORN is a tried and true Republican tactic to suppress voters and nothing more. Anyone can go into their local DMV office, grab a voter registration form and fill it out, with whatever name and info they feel like using, albeit they would be committing voter registration fraud. People, like those working for ACORN, who collect voter registration forms simply let people fill out the forms. It is not their legal responsibility to verify the accuracy of the information. You don't even have to show them ID. So calling ACORN or any voter registrating organization fraudulent is dishonest at best and in an election year, perpetuating a deliberate lie.

And your story is personal stupidity. Read what you are about to sign. End of.

ACORN is not an irrelevance, as postal ballots don't require voters to be present 50 or so times at the polling station. If it is just a GOP distraction, why is the prarctice of obtaining fraudulent voter registrations perpetuated by so many ACORN offices in so many states. Why would they leave themselves open to such charges in the first place? Surely the best way to rise above suspicion is to vet the registrations they collect before they are submitted, not report that some of the ones they submit may be fraudulent and hope the voter monitoring catches them?

And ACORN is certainly not an irrelevance to the American electorate. Just because the media has blown it off as a "GOP" tactic doesn't mean that people haven't formed their own opinion and from what I hear, they don't buy the media whitewash. There is too much of it going on to be just a coincidence and the links back to the Democrat candidate do nothing to help change the perception that there is something dodgy afoot here.

So, before you dismiss the issue with ACORN as don and dusted, look beyond the media sources you rely on and take in what others are saying. You'll find a different picture if you look at both sides.

Hopefully you can see the irony here. You claimed the OP was a non-story but continue to assert that the hoopla behind ACORN is legit. What exactly do you believe ACORN has done wrong (details please)? The GOP has been going after ACORN for a long time....so yes, it is a tactic of theirs and one that has led to absolutely no indictments of any wrong doing by ACORN. I'd like to hear what groups like ACORN are suppose to be doing differently to end all this 'crying foul'?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Hopefully you can see the irony here. You claimed the OP was a non-story but continue to assert that the hoopla behind ACORN is legit. What exactly do you believe ACORN has done wrong (details please)? The GOP has been going after ACORN for a long time....so yes, it is a tactic of theirs and one that has led to absolutely no indictments of any wrong doing by ACORN. I'd like to hear what groups like ACORN are suppose to be doing differently to end all this 'crying foul'?

Steven, you have issues. Investigations involving ACORN activities have been ongoing and did not start with this election, nor are they a GOP ploy. You could use an education regarding the history of questionable activities by ACORN. Let it begin.

The Acorn Indictments

A union-backed outfit faces charges of election fraud. Friday, November 3, 2006 12:01 A.M. EST

So, 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, ####### 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.

[SaadBell 0]

The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida.

The immigration event, which other photos show was packed with red-shirted Acorn member, was co-sponsored by the local Catholic Archdiocese, the SEIU, and other groups.

McCain, still spiting much of his party on immigration at the time, was the headliner.

Bertha Lewis, Acorn's chief organizer, said in a statement that came with the photo, “It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans."

”We are sure that the extremists he is trying to get into a froth will be even more excited to learn that John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with ACORN, at an ACORN co-sponsored event, to promote immigration reform," she said.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/100...in.html?showall

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Hopefully you can see the irony here. You claimed the OP was a non-story but continue to assert that the hoopla behind ACORN is legit. What exactly do you believe ACORN has done wrong (details please)? The GOP has been going after ACORN for a long time....so yes, it is a tactic of theirs and one that has led to absolutely no indictments of any wrong doing by ACORN. I'd like to hear what groups like ACORN are suppose to be doing differently to end all this 'crying foul'?

Steven, you have issues. Investigations involving ACORN activities have been ongoing and did not start with this election, nor are they a GOP ploy. You could use an education regarding the history of questionable activities by ACORN. Let it begin.

I really don't want to read about investigations. I've read enough on the issue. I'm asking someone to tell me, in their words, what exactly has ACORN done wrong? If your only answer is - they turned in fraudulent registration forms, then you failed. More to the point, what exactly should ACORN do in terms of registering voters that would stop the GOP from crying foul?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

VOTE-THEFT, ACORN-STYLE

October 18, 2008 --

Now they're making a federal case out of ACORN.

After weeks of reports of wide spread fraud, the FBI has opened an investigation into the far-left "community organizer" group's nationwide voter-registration campaign.

Talk about bolting the barn after the horses are out. It's extremely unlikely that anything significant will come of it before Election Day.

Still, the fact that the Justice Department has gotten involved signifies an appreciation that what ACORN has tried to portray as the inevitably haphazard efforts of local organizers is more likely a nationwide, coordinated voter-registration scam.

Frankly, it seems to be far too widespread to be anything but that.

More than a dozen states are looking into the registration efforts of the pro-Obama organization - and hundreds of thousands of suspicious or outright fraudulent voter sign-ups have been unearthed.

This, at a time when the radical ACORN reportedly has finally decided to jettison its founder, after the fact that his brother embezzled $1 million from the group (which then tried to cover up the fact) came to light.

Unfortunately, not all the news about ACORN is encouraging.

In Ohio, where state election officials have called in local prosecutors to look into evidence of pervasive fraud in connection with the group, efforts to make it easier to challenge suspicious registrations yesterday were dealt a serious setback.

The US Supreme Court overturned a 10-6 ruling by the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals that ordered Ohio's Democratic secretary of state to provide county officials with the names of new registrants who did not match government databases.

Reports indicated that as many as 200,000 of the 660,000 voters registered this year, largely by ACORN, were suspicious.

The state's GOP said providing the information locally would allow challenges at the polls and require voters whose registration could not immediately be verified to cast provisional ballots.

But that's not going to happen - and in what was the key battleground state in the last election.

Score one for ACORN - and for Barack Obama.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Court documents reveal ACORN's troubled history

Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 6:12 PM ET

Filed Under: Politics

Move over, Bill Ayers. This week, Republican activists have a new Public Enemy #1. It’s ACORN, the once-obscure community-organizing group that boasts of having registered 1.3 million new voters.

Republican officials and advisers to Sen. John McCain have accused ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) of rampant voter-registration fraud. Indeed, officials in states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Indiana and Connecticut now are looking into accusations that ACORN workers turned in thousands of fraudulent or duplicate voter-registration applications. (The Dallas Cowboys magically filled out voter registration forms in Nevada, for example.)

So what exactly is ACORN’s track record in registering new voters? It hasn’t always been pretty. Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from recent court documents and public testimony in three states that have examined ACORN’s hiring practices over the past two years.

Nevada 2008

On October 6, a criminal investigator with the Nevada Secretary of State filed a search-warrant affidavit stating that ACORN workers used “fictitious and false information” on voter registration applications. Among the allegations:

--ACORN hired 59 state prison inmates to collect voter-registration forms. One was Jason Anderson, who currently is imprisoned for burglary and firearms violations at the state’s Casa Grande halfway house in Las Vegas, court records show. Anderson, who became a supervisory “team leader” for ACORN, told state investigators that some of his co-workers “hired by ACORN were ‘lazy crack-heads’ who were not interested in working and just wanted the money.” Anderson is the whistleblower who told state investigators that his inmate colleagues had registered the Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada, along with “large numbers” of other fictitious applications.

--Another ACORN worker, Darmela Jones, said “she submitted approximately 40 Voter Registration Applications while employed at ACORN and only 10 were real applications.” Her excuse? Jones said “it was very hot outside while she was getting people to complete a form.”

--Yet another ACORN canvasser “was caught completing forms using names and addresses copied from the telephone book.”

-- Investigators also identified a Nevada woman, Roberta Casteel, who had not registered to vote but whose voter-registration application was submitted to the state by ACORN. How, then, did the ACORN workers find her name, driver’s license number and Social Security number? Here’s one clue: Casteel’s purse was stolen last year, she said. Now how would state inmates living in a halfway house know about that?

Ohio 2008

Election officials in Ohio’s most populous county asked a prosecutor Monday to investigate alleged voter-registration fraud. One local man, Freddie Johnson of Cleveland, testified before the bipartisan Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that ACORN workers encouraged him to sign 73 voter registration forms—all in his own name.

“They get paid off a signature,” he said. “So they just needed a signature and told me I wasn’t going to get into trouble.”

In an interview with the Cleveland NBC station, WKYC, after the hearing, Johnson said the ACORN workers paid him a few bucks and gave him a few cigarettes in exchange for the multiple signatures. ACORN said the workers in question were fired.

Washington State 2007

The King County Prosecutor’s Office filed criminal charges last year against seven ACORN workers accused of submitting 1,762 fraudulent voter registrations to the state in 2006. The workers--many of whom had prior convictions-- went to the Seattle Public Library and filled out forms “based on names, addresses and telephone numbers taken from the telephone books,” state prosecutor Daniel Satterberg said.

In addition, one of the canvassers paid $8 an hour by ACORN “said it was hard work making up all those cards,” according to a probable-cause statement by a King County Sheriff’s detective. Another ACORN worker boasted “he would often sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out cards,” the statement said.

Several of the Seattle-based ACORN workers had criminal histories prior to their employment. One had pleaded guilty to second-degree child molestation, and another had pleaded guilty to harassment for writing a bomb-threat note. Yet another had a crack-cocaine problem.

“We believe that ACORN’s internal quality control procedures were not just deficient but entirely non-existent,” Satterberg said. “This was an act of vandalism against our voter rolls.”

ACORN Responds

In an interview today with NBC News, ACORN spokesman Charles Jackson defended the group’s voter-registration drives. “Our system works,” he said. “I don’t know what more we can do.”

Jackson said that ACORN itself had identified most of the fraudulent or duplicative registration forms this campaign year, and not state officials. He said the error rate of the 1.3 million voters registered was “a very small percentage.” And he defended the hiring of inmates in Nevada.

“We believe in giving people a second chance,” Jackson said. “We thought we had a system in place to check it.”

[Pooky 3,784]

Hopefully you can see the irony here. You claimed the OP was a non-story but continue to assert that the hoopla behind ACORN is legit. What exactly do you believe ACORN has done wrong (details please)? The GOP has been going after ACORN for a long time....so yes, it is a tactic of theirs and one that has led to absolutely no indictments of any wrong doing by ACORN. I'd like to hear what groups like ACORN are suppose to be doing differently to end all this 'crying foul'?

Steven, you have issues. Investigations involving ACORN activities have been ongoing and did not start with this election, nor are they a GOP ploy. You could use an education regarding the history of questionable activities by ACORN. Let it begin.

I really don't want to read about investigations. I've read enough on the issue. I'm asking someone to tell me, in their words, what exactly has ACORN done wrong? If your only answer is - they turned in fraudulent registration forms, then you failed. More to the point, what exactly should ACORN do in terms of registering voters that would stop the GOP from crying foul?

How can you say that? ACORN have admitted turning in fraudulent voter registrations. Their CYA is that they told authorities that some might be. Remember, denial isn't just a river in Africa.

Back to the OP, it is a non-issue. If people can't be bothered to read what they are signing, be it a "petition", a contract or any other form of docuentation, they have no recourse to say that they were duped. They were just dumb, that's all.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida.

The immigration event, which other photos show was packed with red-shirted Acorn member, was co-sponsored by the local Catholic Archdiocese, the SEIU, and other groups.

McCain, still spiting much of his party on immigration at the time, was the headliner.

Bertha Lewis, Acorn's chief organizer, said in a statement that came with the photo, “It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans."

”We are sure that the extremists he is trying to get into a froth will be even more excited to learn that John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with ACORN, at an ACORN co-sponsored event, to promote immigration reform," she said.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/100...in.html?showall

McCain wasn't part of ACORN's legal team in 1995. Obama was . He didn't train ACORN organizers. Obama did. He didn't become deeply involved in their voter registration drives. Obama did.

Clever Obama Tries To Bury ACORN Past

Monday, October 13, 2008 2:22 PM

By: Lowell Ponte

“Barack Obama never organized with ACORN,” reads one of the banners on Barack Obama’s Web site, “Fight the Smears,” www.fightthesmears.org.

One apparent aim of the site is to distance Obama from the controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, whose operatives are being investigated for potential voter fraud in at least 13 states.

“Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer,” the Web site continues.

“Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.

“Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.”

The accuracy of these denials depends in part on their lawyerly wording, on “what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” in former President Bill Clinton’s sophistic phrase.

No one has accused the Illinois senator of having “organized with ACORN” or having been “an ACORN community organizer,” so these denials seem either misplaced or sleight of hand to distract from what his actual ACORN connections have been.

Toni Foulkes, longtime Chicago ACORN leader and a member of ACORN’s National Association Board, says the organization “invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office.”

Obama did give training to ACORN leaders every year from 1993 until at least 2003, when Foulkes published an article saying these things about him in the winter 2003 issue of the journal Social Policy.

Obama also reportedly helped train the staff of a high-ranking ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, later arrested for heading up a disruptive confrontation between ACORN protesters and the Chicago City Council described in a recent Newsmax investigation.

ACORN spokesman Lewis Goldberg is referenced in the Oct. 11 New York Times as acknowledging that, in Times’ reporter Stephanie Strom’s words, “Mr. Obama conducted two leadership training sessions of roughly an hour each for ACORN’s Chicago affiliate over a three-year period in the late 1990s. He was not paid for that work, Mr. Goldberg said."

So ACORN now says that Obama did training for the organization. But because Obama did these training sessions without pay, and because to hire means “to employ someone for a wage or fee,” it is technically correct to say he was never “hired” to do so.

ACORN both selected and paid Barack Obama as a lawyer in 1995 to sue the state of Illinois to compel implementation of a law known as Motor-Voter. ACORN, however, now says it was only one of several plaintiffs in the case and hence that it would be wrong to say Obama was the organization’s lawyer. But ACORN was the lead plaintiff, and therefore the case is recorded as ACORN, et al. v. Edgar (then-Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar).

In 1992 Obama became Illinois’ statewide head of Project Vote, a 501©(3) organization that is required to be nonpartisan to retain its tax-exempt status. The Obama campaign Web site says, “ACORN was not part of Project Vote.” Critics argue that the reverse is true.

In fact, Obama said during a speech to ACORN leaders in November: When “I ran the Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it.”

Veteran journalist Karen Tumulty and two of her colleagues described Project Vote in the Oct. 18, 2004, issue of Time magazine as “a nonpartisan arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now” after interviewing its national director.

And the co-founder and then head of ACORN itself, former Students for a Democratic Society new leftist Wade Rathke described Project Vote, in 2004 as one of ACORN’s “family of organizations.”

As Newsmax reported last week, Rathke spun off nearly 100 legal entities from ACORN and moved large amounts of money among them. Rathke left the organization this year after it came to light that his brother had diverted almost a million dollars from ACORN coffers.

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told the New York Times that a significant part of Project Vote’s revenues today flow to ACORN and various of its affiliates as payment for services. But LaBolt contends that Project Vote and ACORN were not as intertwined in 1992 when Obama ran Project Vote. This month, LaBolt has been telling reporters that Obama had never been “an ACORN trainer.”

It “wasn’t until after Mr. Obama’s tenure had ended that (Project Vote) began to conduct projects more frequently with ACORN than with other community-based organizations,” Project Vote founder attorney Sanford A. Newman wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal. Note that this lawyerly letter never denies Project Vote’s deep involvement with ACORN.

“To say that Obama didn’t work for ACORN is just playing word games,” wrote Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, co-author of an investigation titled Barack Obama: A Radical Leftist’s Journey from Community Organizing to Politics.

“It would be like a Sam’s Club employee indignantly insisting he didn’t work for Wal-Mart,” Vadum said. “It boggles the mind why anyone would deny such easily verifiable facts.”

Obama’s critics say he has been remarkably successful at burying his ACORN past until now, in large part with help from liberal allies in the national media who refuse to scrutinize Obama with the same probing investigations they aim at his opponents.

In a story reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” whose hero works in a government office rewriting history to erase Big Brother’s past mistakes, the Oct. 9th Cleveland Leader reported, “Attempts to hide evidence of Obama’s involvement in ACORN have included wiping the Web clean of potentially damaging articles.”

The above-mentioned Foulkes article that discussed Obama’s training of ACORN leaders recently was pulled from the Social Policy Web site, the Leader reported. Although this makes information about Obama’s past harder to find for journalists and voters, the Leader noted, scholarly duplicates of the Web retain copies of such texts despite any Orwellian efforts to rewrite Barack Obama’s past.

Los Angeles Times reporters Letta Tayler and Keith Herbert tried to clarify Obama’s past and found getting a clear fix on him elusive.

“Further blurring the picture,” they wrote on March 2, are Barack Obama’s “descriptions of community organizing in his youthful memoir, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ in which he admits he disguises names, creates composite characters, switches some chronologies, and uses ‘approximation’ of dialogue.”

[Pooky 3,784]

The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida.

The immigration event, which other photos show was packed with red-shirted Acorn member, was co-sponsored by the local Catholic Archdiocese, the SEIU, and other groups.

McCain, still spiting much of his party on immigration at the time, was the headliner.

Bertha Lewis, Acorn's chief organizer, said in a statement that came with the photo, “It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans."

”We are sure that the extremists he is trying to get into a froth will be even more excited to learn that John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with ACORN, at an ACORN co-sponsored event, to promote immigration reform," she said.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/100...in.html?showall

Just because ACORN is corrupt doesn't mean that McCain isn't a total idiot.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Obama and ACORN: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

Monday, October 6, 2008 7:26 PM

By: Lowell Ponte

Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization.

ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare.

Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site — a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate.

The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize.

“So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. 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.”

Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization.

He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases.

Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN.

As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.”

Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics.

He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities.

Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006.

ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru.

To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago ACORN leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and ACORN were ‘old friends.’”

ACORN’s Radical Roots

ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado.

Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.)

ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale.

“We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.”

In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky.

“Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’”

The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.”

Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud

Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies.

Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes.

Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud.

The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.”

Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations.

Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new.

Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law.

Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote.

In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds.

Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501©(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.

ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well.

In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill.

“A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.”

And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters.

In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.”

In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information.

In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.”

In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state.

In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.”

ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior.

Intimidation Politics

Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session.

These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.”

Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials.

A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.”

Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration.

Money-Hungry ACORN

By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing.

“In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.”

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens.

A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing.

According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations.

After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law.

Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN.

By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds.

In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work.

Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year.

But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns.

ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis

President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods.

Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan.

Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival.

“The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.

“The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus.

“The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.”

Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic.

With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk.

The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans.

Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million.

As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace.

Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government.

For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists.

And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN.

Greedy Lefists

The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities.

They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property.

One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.”

But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.”

Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.”

Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.”

ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers.

According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference.

But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants.

ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members.

When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using.

But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts.

Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments.

ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN.

“How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.”

“We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left.

Welcome to ACORN, the organization that made Barack Obama what he is today, and that may make him president of the United States.