Thread: Voter Fraud Being Brought to Light

E-Verify us voters!

Exactly!!!!! I don't mind one bit!!!!!!

North Carolina looks at voter fraud claim

RALEIGH, N.C. – The State Board of Elections in North Carolina is investigating suspicious voter registration forms submitted by a grass-roots organization whose problems have drawn national attention.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, conducted a voter drive that registered nearly 28,000 people in North Carolina. But some of the forms it filed had information that may have been copied from phone books, local election officials said.

Durham County's elections office turned over about 120 suspect forms to the state for investigation about three weeks ago, and Wake County's elections office sent in about 30 suspicious forms last week.

Gary Bartlett, the state board's executive director, said ACORN has cooperated with the investigation into the questionable Durham forms.

MCT News Service

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib ... ation.html

ACORN defends efforts amid voter-fraud allegations

WASHINGTON (AP) — An activist organization on Tuesday defended its voter registration practices amid new allegations of voter fraud and a call from Republican lawmakers to investigate irregularities.

In Ohio, a key swing state in an election that is won on a state-by-state basis, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama told reporters that the group's registration problems should not be used by the Republicans as an excuse to keep voters from turning out on Election Day.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, has registered 1.3 million young people, minorities and poor and working-class voters, the group says.

Some of those registration cards have become the focus of fraud investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least five other states. Election officials also recently questioned the group's voter forms in Ohio and North Carolina, a southern state that is normally a safe bet for Republicans but is now up for grabs.

More than 13,000 workers in 21 states recruited low-income voters, who tend to be Democrats.

"The vast, vast majority were dedicated workers," ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan said at a news conference on Tuesday. "They did something remarkable in bringing all these new voters."

On Monday, election officials in Ohio's most populous county asked a prosecutor to investigate multiple registrations by four people who signed up through ACORN. One voter said he signed 73 voter registration forms over a five-month period.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections is reviewing suspect voter forms from at least two counties.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have also renewed their push for the Justice Department to investigate the group. On Friday, six Republican leaders wrote to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to urge him to make sure ballots by ineligible or fraudulent voters are not counted on Nov. 4.

A law enforcement official said ACORN has been on the radar of federal investigators. But the official would not say whether an investigation has been opened, and spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue so close to the presidential election.

Whelan said ACORN staffers separate applications with missing or false information and flag them for election officials. All applications, including problematic cards, are handed in because some state laws require it, he said.

Whelan said he did not know how many registration cards had problems but believed it was a small percentage. He was unsure how many workers were fired for purposely turning in duplicates or applications with fake information, he said.

"If they look false, we identify them as such," Whelan said of the forms.

ACORN has been drawn into a back-and-forth between the presidential campaigns.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's campaign on Tuesday said Obama should rein in ACORN's efforts in order to fight voter fraud. The campaign accuses the Democratic presidential candidate of having close ties to the group.

Obama and two other lawyers in 1995 represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois to make voter registration easier. During this year's primary, Obama hired a firm with ties to the group for a massive get-out-the-vote effort.

Obama told reporters on Tuesday that ACORN was not advising his campaign on voter registration.

Last week, McCain called for a federal investigation of the organization during a campaign rally. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, has said Obama's connection to the activist group should be investigated.

"This is another one of those distractions that get stirred up during the campaign," Obama

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/e ... ions_N.htm

Well Lookie here! Flyer posted at the link.

Busted!... Ohio ACORN Hired 'Get Out the Vote' Workers to Canvass For Obama & Even Advertised It

More hope and change for America...
Two different Ohio blogs posted an email from ACORN on February 21, 2008 announcing that Ohio ACORN is doing a Get Out The Vote project with the OBAMA Campaign.

The email even admitted:

Ohio ACORN is hiring canvassers to go door to door encouraging voters to vote for Barak Obama.

This was back in February during the Democratic primary.

SuperSekritZH#? discovered this--
Writes Like She Talks blog posted the email from Ohio ACORN:


Ohio Daily Blog also posted the email:

Here is the email from Ohio ACORN:

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 Barak Obama.

ACORN is hiring in Cleveland (216)431-3905 , Columbus (614)425-9491, Cincinnati (513)221-1737, for Dayton (call Cincinnati), and for Toledo call Cleveland. Or email polnatoh@acorn.org and your inquiry will be routed to the appropriate person in each of these cities. Intake and training will be held daily at local ACORN offices. Canvass begins on Wednesday Feb. 27th and will work through election day. Please, only persons wishing to work all or most of these days (Saturday and Sunday included) should inquire.

Please do not contact the Obama campaign directly regarding this post as they are not the organization doing the hiring and it will only distract their staff and volunteers from the other important work they are doing on behalf of Senator Obama.

The Cleveland Leader has more on the liberal Ohio Daily Blog.

This is so obviously crooked.
It is similar to what ACORN workers were doing for Claire McCaskill in 2006 in Missouri.
Isn't it time the feds stepped in?

Babalu says it's about time for one of these speeches: "That's not the ACORN I knew."

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/ ... obama.html

Palin: Obama must ‘rein in’ ACORN

Andy Barr
2 hours, 54 minutes ago

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin suggested Tuesday that Barack Obama shares responsibility for recent reports of voter fraud conducted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Obama has a responsibility to rein in ACORN,â€

Federal court: Ohio must check voter registrations

By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writer

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Ohio's top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify the eligibility of newly registered voters and make the information available to the state's 88 county election boards.

The full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court ruling that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must use other government records to check thousands of new voters for registration fraud.

A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had disagreed last week. The full court's ruling, in which nine of 16 judges concurred, overturns that decision.

Ohio Republicans had sued Brunner, a Democrat. Her spokesman had no immediate comment Tuesday.

About 666,000 Ohioans have registered to vote since January, with many doing so before the contested Democratic presidential primary election last March between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The presidential election is Nov. 4.

Since the primary, Ohio Republicans have filed a series of challenges to the registrations and Brunner's administration of election rules. They have helped voters file lawsuits against local boards of election over registration rules, absentee ballot requests and a weeklong period that allowed registration and voting on the same day.

Brunner previously said sufficient systems exist to verify new voter registrations and there was no way to set up the court-ordered system with such speed.

Last week, the three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had sided with Brunner, but the full panel sided with the GOP and U.S. District Judge George C. Smith in Columbus after hearing an appeal. Smith had ordered Brunner to develop a way to verify voter registration information and make it available to local election boards.

The federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the current system "is essentially useless — not unlike asking for a drink of water and being given access to a fire hose at full volume — and will do nothing to address the anti-fraud objective."

Brunner argued that it would take two to three days to create the necessary computer programs, and said nothing in the federal Help America Vote Act required her to do what the district court ordered.

Tuesday's order directs Brunner to verify new registrations by comparing that information with data from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the Social Security Administration.

"As far as we can tell, the problem with the current system is not that it is insufficiently user-friendly but that it is effectively useless," the majority said in its ruling.

Ohio Republican Chairman Bob Bennett accused Brunner of pursuing a partisan agenda and said "her delay in providing this matching system leaves little time for election officials to act on questionable registrations."

Bennett said Brunner was destroying the public's trust in Ohio's elections system.

"Her shameful actions to disenfranchise Republican absentee voters, block the transparency of early voting and refuse the proper verification of newly registered voters have rightfully damaged her credibility as a nonpartisan election administrator," he said.

Polling in the state shows Obama, now the Democratic presidential nominee, slightly ahead of Republican challenger John McCain. Both campaigns have worked hard in the state, which has 20 electoral votes and gave President Bush a second term in 2004.

Elsewhere in the state, the state GOP has requested information on voters in Licking County, in central Ohio, who registered and cast an early ballot on the same day during a weeklong period. The request is similar to one made last week by the Republican sheriff of Greene County that infuriated Democrats and voting rights groups, and was withdrawn a day later.

The GOP has said it is concerned that the same-day voting period could have made it easier to commit voter fraud.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081015/ap_ ... IzMzWs0NUE

Campaigns take aim as voter-fraud allegations emerge

By Matt Kelley, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Less than three weeks before the November election, the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns are trading accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression and gearing up for possible court battles over the outcome.
A main focus of the controversy again Tuesday was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a liberal group that says it has registered more than 1.3 million new voters this year. Representatives of GOP presidential nominee John McCain held a news conference in Washington to accuse it of a pattern of submitting fraudulent voter registrations.

Democratic nominee Barack Obama, who was in Ohio preparing for tonight's debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., told reporters that the dispute over ACORN was "one of these distractions that gets stirred up in the course of a campaign." He added, however, that the issue should not be used by Republicans "as an excuse for the kind of voter-suppression strategies and tactics that we've seen in the past."

ACORN has been at the heart of voter-registration fraud complaints in past campaigns.

More than two dozen former voter-registration workers for ACORN have been charged or convicted of submitting fraudulent registrations since 2004, court records show. Kevin Whelan, a spokesman for the group, didn't dispute that the group has submitted improper or duplicate voter registrations this year, but he said it fires any canvassers found to be submitting fake registrations and notifies election officials.

Voter-registration fraud is more common than voter fraud, say voting experts such as Thad Hall of the University of Utah. "The actual number of cases prosecuted relating to voter fraud are actually low," said Hall, who co-edited a book on voting fraud released in June.

In California, for example, there were 469 cases of fraudulent voter registration resolved from 1994 to 2003, compared with 253 cases of voting fraud, according to a study in the book from Michael Alvarez of the California Institute of Technology.

Having fake names or ineligible voters on the rolls "absolutely and definitely translates into fraudulent ballots cast," Republican election lawyer Thor Hearne said.

He cited the case of a man in Cleveland who cast an absentee ballot under the name of Darnell Nash. Jane Platten, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, said Nash was one of several people registered by ACORN to vote using addresses of actual voters. He has been stricken from the voter rolls, and the elections board will consider disqualifying his ballot, she said.

Republicans point to other probes of the group's voter drive in states including Nevada, New Mexico and Connecticut. "There have been incredible amounts of registrations that have been improper that could very well result in improper voting," former Republican senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire said at a briefing organized by the McCain campaign Tuesday.

Obama's campaign paid Citizens Services Inc., an ACORN affiliate, $832,000 this year for help identifying voters in the Democratic primaries, according to campaign-finance records complied by the non-partisan CQ MoneyLine. ACORN and CSI have gotten more than $375,000 this year from Democratic candidates and liberal political groups, including $200,000 from the Fund for America, founded by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta.

It is not uncommon for campaigns to pay outside groups to help register voters

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/e ... ions_N.htm

November results 'already tainted' by ACORN
Former senators warn problem worse than Florida election nightmare of 2000

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: October 14, 2008
8:21 pm Eastern


By Bob Unruh
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

A former senator today said the November results already have been "tainted" by actions of ACORN, and the 2008 election could be a nightmare worse than the 2000 dispute in Florida.

John Danforth, a former Missouri senator and ambassador to the United Nations, said the actions of the organization, which has been accused in more than a dozen states of submitting fraudulent voter registrations, are "just plain wrong."

Cited were problems that included a voter registration for Mickey Mouse in Florida, voter cards in Indiana with the name of the Jimmy John restaurant chain, one man's 73 registrations in Ohio – for which he testified on a video he was offered money and cigarettes, and 10 registrations for a dead Missouri woman.

Those violations are just the tip of the iceberg of the controversy that is putting officials for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, on the defensive. The group held its own news conference to suggest Republicans were raising the issue of fake voter registrations to divert attention away from other issues.

But at a Washington news conference, Danforth worried over the potential for a 2008 disaster on Nov. 4.

"The issue could be whether it is fair at all and whether the losing side believes it has been fairly defeated or it has been cheated. … We believe that this is a potential nightmare," he said.

Danforth said this year's election could be "even worse than 2000," when literally hundreds of attorneys and others disputed for days over the Florida recount, which escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court before it was resolved in favor of then-Gov. George W. Bush over ex-Vice President Al Gore.

Danforth and former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman, both supporters of GOP candidate Sen. John McCain, suggested both his and Sen. Barack Obama's campaigns identify potential trouble spots and assign volunteers to monitor voting there.

Rudman noted that many of the problems have been blamed on people paid by ACORN to register new voters.

But officials for the Employment Policies Institute, who have monitored ACORN's activities over the years and have published a RottenAcorn.com website to publicize its problems, say the organization has a long history of exactly the same types of disputes.

Spokeswoman Sarah Longwell told WND while most people now are just becoming familiar with ACORN, the organization has been around for years and almost invariably pops up at election time facing accusations of rampant voter fraud.

"I think why people are paying attention now is because Obama used to work for them, and according to the Wall Street Journal, has given them $800,000."

She told WND the organization typically blames "rogue" local organizers for the fraudulent names and addresses submitted to election officials.

"This is a pattern and practice these guys have every election cycle," she said.

So will there be problems with the 2008 election?

"I do think there will be a higher level of scrutiny of the organization during the national election," she said. "There absolutely needs to be. You don't put in false registrations if there is not an effort afoot to do something."

She disputes the group's description of itself as non-partisan.

"They are absolutely partisan. They only try to register Democrats. We as a nation need to scrutinize everything that ACORN does. They simply cannot be trusted," Longwell said.

"Even if we take their leadership at their word, that they've got [some] rogue leaders, it happens so often and is so rampant that the organization is not effectively policing their workers."

Jake Tapper on the ABC blog website noted that Obama campaign officials were forced to backtrack recently for a statement that said, "Barack was never an ACORN training and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity."

The report said Obama did, in fact, work as an unpaid leader for training sessions in Chicago in the 1990s. The report said Obama also represented ACORN then in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois over voter registration issues.

Investor's Business Daily reported that not only has Obama worked with ACORN, he's promised to let its members have input into how he would shape an agenda for a presidency.

A YouTube video also reveals Obama making a commitment to involve ACORN in his policy-creating process:



Former Federal Election Commission member Hans von Spakovsky told Fox News that fraudulent voter registrations disenfranchise legitimate voters by delaying the process run by election offices across the nation.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, joined several dozen other House Republicans today in calling for an investigation into the funding that ACORN has received from the federal government to operate housing and other programs.

The Blue Collar Muse on Conservablogs described ACORN's work as a "strategy for voter fraud."

"Much has been made of the Democrats 50 state strategy to win the election. Who knew there was a fall back 15 state strategy to steal it if they couldn’t win it?" he wrote. "This year ACORN is under scrutiny in over a fourth of America's 50 states."

The posting cited pending cases in Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin, so far.

Suspicions include counts of falsifying and forging voter registration carts.

On the RottenAcorn website, numerous previous cases involving ACORN are cited from elections ranging back to 1998. In 2004 in Colorado, for example, an ACORN employee admitted forging signatures and registering three of her friends to vote 40 times.

In Florida's Orange County, elections officials rejected Mickey Mouse's application, which had been stamped with the ACORN logo.

"This is part of a widespread and systemic effort … to undermine the election process," said Sean Cairncross, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee.

The dispute has grown to the point that ACORN is addressing it on its own website.

"[ACORN] success in bringing people into the democratic process ha[s] been greeted with unfounded accusations to disparage our work," the organization said. In fact, it said, ACORN is the victim, because of those employees who would violate rules while on the organization's payroll.

"When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. But for some reason, when ACORN turns voter registration workers over to the authorities for filling out bogus forms, it gets accused of 'voter fraud.' This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, these charges are outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated," the group said.

WND previously has reportedhow Obama's own website was misleading the public regarding the presidential candidate's ties to ACORN.


www.worldnetdaily.com

ACORN active in voter registration in county

High rate of "red flag" registrations noted

By Hiram Soto and Helen Gao
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

12:50 p.m. October 16, 2008

The community organizing group that presidential candidate John McCain said on Wednesday night “may be destroying the fabric of democracyâ€

Election lawsuits piling up
By John Fund

From News Services

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Our nation may be on the brink of repeating the 2000 Florida election debacle, but this time in several states, with allegations of voter fraud, intimidation and flawed voting machines added to the generalized chaos that sent Bush v. Gore to the Supreme Court for overtime.

“If you think of election problems as akin to forest fires, the woods are no drier than they were in 2000, but many more people have matches,â€