The ACORN voter fraud scandal has gotten so big and is being investigated in so many different states, not many know exactly what to do about it.
Start with the ACORN-Barack Obama connection. First and foremost, ACORN is a liberal group and the problems stem from their "voter drives" where they go out and get people to register... the problem is, they are registering the same people, in one case, 73 times, dead people, pets and under-aged children (even a 7 year-old), they offer cash and cigarettes as payment to get people to keep registering multiple times and they have had members convicted in previous years for the same type of behavior.
That is the tip of the iceberg.
Wall Street Journal cuts to the chase:
Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago "community organizer" at Acorn's side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn's leaders for being "smack dab in the middle" of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.
During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for "staging, sound, lighting." It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.
The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.
I will also list all previous pieces about ACORN written here at the bottom of this post.
In Indiana, ACORN aka Association of Community Organizations for Reform, election officials were going through 5,000 ACORN submissions and gave up after 2,100 of them were found to be fraudulent, via Instapundit, we have video of the news report.
YouTube URL here and video below:
In Ohio, 4,000 of ACORN submissions have been found to be questionable.
ACORN, whose political arm has endorsed Democratic nominee Barack Obama, has signed up more than 1.3 million voters for this cycle.
Investors Business Daily also speaks of the ACORN/Obama relationship:
Of course, Obama denies being a trainer for ACORN and its staff of community rabble-rousers now engaged in massive countrywide vote fraud to elect the man who helped lead their effort to force banks to issue loans to people who could not afford them.
Obama's Web site proclaims, "Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity." Then how is it that Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes sang Obama's praises for his work for ACORN in his article, "Case Study: Chicago — The Barack Obama Campaign," which appeared in Social Policy magazine in 2004?
Foulkes said ACORN first recognized Obama's talents as a community organizer when he was organizing on Chicago's far south side with the Developing Communities Project.
Foulkes wrote: "When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois' refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act . . . . Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar . . . and we won."
Then Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar balked at implementing the new federal "Motor Voter" law out of concern that allowing people to register via postcard and blocking the state from pruning voter rolls might invite vote fraud. We wonder where he got that idea.
Foulkes says that "Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Mosely Braun to win the Senate that year. Project Vote delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them)."
ACORN was so impressed with Obama's work with and for ACORN that, according to Foulkes, "Since then, we have 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."
Last November, Obama told the group, "I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran (the) Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work."
Much more at that link about Obama/ACORN.
Ohio Daily Blog, via Malkin, brings the announcement back in February from Ohio ACORN political director Mari Engelhardt:
GOTV for Obama! Ohio ACORN is doing a Get Out The Vote project with the OBAMA Campaign. Ohio ACORN is hiring canvassers to go door to door encouraging voters to vote for Barack Obama.
More Obama/ACORN connections found at Pajamas Media.
With less than a month before the presidential election, ACORN is now being investigated in 14 states, so far, and they are responsible for millions of newly registered voters for Barack Obama.
How many of those millions are real people? How many are eligible to vote?
This has become a huge issue and it appears that it is about to become even larger.
All previous pieces about ACORN, from WUA, can be found here.
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