The Inside Story of ACORN 8

The Provocateur ^ | 06/20/2009 | Mike Volpe

[fiscon1]

There is an old saying, "it's not the crime but the cover up". Martha Stewart is a good example. Her initial crime would have likely lead to a somewhat hefty fine had she admitted to it. Because she attempted to cover it up, she wound up going to jail.

The story of the formation of ACORN 8 can be summed up by a new saying, "it's the crime AND the cover up".

[jeffc]

BM for later read

[ETL]

"With the New Party’s rise and its entanglements with ACORN [Association of Community Organizers For Reform Now] came the rise of Barack Obama. According to Stanley Kurtz, “Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s ‘New Left,’ with a ‘1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism’ to match.” And Barack Obama was ACORN’s lawyer."

http://archive.redstate.com/stories/elections/2008/barack_obama_sought_the_new_partys_endorsement_knowing_it_was_a_radical_left_organization
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From Obama's official website:

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.”

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is the nation's largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, with over 350,000 member families organized into 800 neighborhood chapters in 104 cities across the country. Since 1970 ACORN has taken action and won victories on issues of concern to its members, including better housing for first time homebuyers and tenants, living wages for low-wage workers, more investment in our communities from banks and governments, and better public schools.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/gGC7zm
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October 08, 2008
Archives prove Obama was a New Party member (updated)
Thomas Lifson

Another piece in the puzzle of Barack Obama has been revealed, greatly strengthening the picture of a man groomed by an older generation of radical leftists for insertion into the American political process, trading on good looks, brains, educational pedigree, and the desire of the vast majority of the voting public to right the historical racial wrongs of the land.

The New Party was a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left. It was an attempt to regroup the forces on the left in a new strategy to take power, burrowing from within. The party only lasted until 1998, when its strategy of "fusion" failed to withstand a Supreme Court ruling. But dissolving the party didn't stop the membership, including Barack Obama, from continuing to move the Democrats leftward with spectacular success.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/archives_prove_obama_was_a_new.html
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NOTE: As of today, June 10, 2009, DiscoverTheNetworks.org/FrontPageMag.com profile doesn't (yet?) include the latest revelation that (President) Obama was actually a member of the New Party. HOWEVER, he does link to several articles on the left side of the page that apparently do go into it in detail.-ETL

PROFILE: NEW PARTY (NP)
* Marxist political coalition
* Was active from 1992-1998
* Endorsed Barack Obama for Illinois state senate seat in 1996

Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials -- most often Democrats. The New Party's short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist third party.

Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America and the militant organization ACORN. The party's Chicago chapter also included a large contingent from the Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members.

The New Party's modus operandi included the political strategy of "electoral fusion," where it would nominate, for various political offices, candidates from other parties (usually Democrats), thereby enabling each of those candidates to occupy more than one ballot line in the voting booth. By so doing, the New Party often was able to influence candidates' platforms. (Fusion of this type is permitted in seven states -- Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, and Vermont -- but is common only in New York.)

Though Illinois was not one of the states that permitted electoral fusion, in 1995 Barack Obama nonetheless sought the New Party's endorsement for his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.

In 1996, three of the four candidates endorsed by the New Party won their electoral primaries. The three victors included Barack Obama (in the 13th State Senate District), Danny Davis (in the 7th Congressional District), and Patricia Martin, who won the race for Judge in the 7th Subcircuit Court. All four candidates attended an April 11, 1996 New Party membership meeting to express their gratitude for the party's support.

The New Party's various chapters similarly helped to elect dozens of other political candidates in a host of American cities.

One of the more notable New Party members was Carl Davidson, a Chicago-based Marxist who became a political supporter of Barack Obama in the mid-1990s.

In 1997 the New Party's influence declined precipitously after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that electoral fusion was not protected by the First Amendment's freedom of association clause. By 1998 the party was essentially defunct. Daniel Canto and other key party members went on to establish a new organization with similar ideals, the Working Families Party of New York.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7434
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The Columbus Free Press
New Party Online News - Elections Update

In the end the outcome was predictable, and predictably depressing. Voting for Clinton while simultaneously supporting the local Republican Congressman was not contradictory. My personal favorite line: With these results, I'd better get some of that medicinal marijuana...

So we're back where we were a few days ago. Gingrich sets the agenda, Clinton rotates it a few degrees to make it palatable. Our task, and there are no shortcuts, is to build enough power to produce better choices in the future.

A few more steps down that road were taken by local New Party chapters on Tuesday. Here are some highlights:

Overall: Campaign finance led the way, with overwhelming victories in Arkansas and Massachusetts. Not counting Washington, DC's ANC races, NP members and supported candidates won 16 of 23 races, bringing our overall total to 110 victories in 163 races.

Arkansas: As local favorite Bill Clinton swept to victory under cloud of tainted contributions, an NP and ACORN-backed statewide initiative for real campaign finance reform won an overwhelming victory, outpolling Clinton and Perot combined. The measure lowers contribution limits to $300 for statewide candidates and $100 for state legislative and local candidates, grants a tax credit for small donors, and tightens reporting and disclosure requirements. It'll be a big step in leveling the playing field for grassroots candidates against their corporate funded opponents. And in the first city-wide victory for a New Party candidate in Little Rock, member Paul Kelly won an at-large City Council seat. He'll join NP members Gloria Wilson and Willie Hinton on the Council, with the potential for a strong progressive caucus. In a second at-large City Council race, NP member Genevieve Stewart made a strong showing. She finished third against 2 entrenched incumbents but built her name recognition and a base of support for a possible ward race for City Council next year. Finally, in a classic New Party vs. the Right Wing matchup, member Jayne Cia handily defeated the Arkansas state chair of Empower America (Bill Bennett's organization) for a seat on the County Board.

Illinois: The first NP member heads to Congress, as Danny Davis wins an overwhelming 85% victory yesterday (he got a higher percentage of the vote in that district than the President). NP member and State Senate candidate Barack Obama won uncontested. Interestingly, it appears that the local Democratic machine is trying to distance itself from our folks. At a "Democratic Unity" march on Chicago's West Side, a flyer invited community members to join with a host of local democratic candidates. The only two west-side Democrats not listed: NP members Danny Davis (U.S. House candidate) and Michael Chandler (Alderman and Ward Committeeman). ..."

New Party
227 West 40th St. Suite 1303
New York, NY 10018
phone: 800-200-1294
fax: 212-302-5344
email: newparty@newparty.org
web site: http://www.newparty.org

http://www.freepress.org/Backup/UnixBackup/pubhtml/newparty/newpart5.html
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"Although the New Party has been effectively defunct since the late 1990s, a website still exists."-wikipedia
http://www.newparty.org/
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Inside Obama’s Acorn:
By their fruits ye shall know them
Stanley Kurtz, May 29, 2008

"What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama."
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDZiMjkwMDczZWI5ODdjOWYxZTIzZGIyNzEyMjE0ODI
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Guilty Party: ACORN, Obama, and the mortgage mess
Mona Charen, September 30, 2008
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Mzk4MmVkNzA1NGQ2NGRkZjQ2YjNmYjdlODZkMmQ4N2I=
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An ACORN Falls from the Tree: A congressional outrage
Ken Blackwell, September 29, 2008
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2Y5MTc0ZTAyMmE1Mjk3NGE3OWRiY2FkMjZlN2YxYzc=
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From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: WADE RATHKE

Wade Rathke founded the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), for which he served as Chief Organizer from 1970 to 2008. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of the Tides Center; a Board member of the Tides Foundation; an Executive Board member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); and Chairman of the AFL-CIO’s Organizers Forum. Rathke describes himself as someone who is dedicated to “winning social justice, workers' rights, and a democracy where ‘the people shall rule’”; i.e., socialism.

Rathke hails from a family of prosperous orange ranchers in Orange County, California. During the late 1960s he attended Williams College in Massachusetts but dropped out before graduating. He thereafter became a draft-resistance organizer for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and an organizer for George Wiley’s National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO). (For details on NWRO, see the separate entries for George Wiley and the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”)

In 1970, Wiley sent Rathke to Little Rock, Arkansas to begin organizing NWRO chapters in the South. By that time, Wiley -- who was African American -- was coming under attack by black militants who opposed his policy of placing whites such as Rathke in NWRO leadership positions.

Rathke, perhaps sensing that he might soon be demoted or released entirely, in 1970 formed a new organization called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). He enlisted civil rights workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse University) patterned after Saul Alinsky’s activist tactics.

The group’s name was later changed to Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the acronym ACORN remained the same. ..."

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1773

[fiscon1]

be forewarned, it’s fairly long. Though, stories like this can’t be said in a pithy way, to borrow from O’Reilly.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Looks to me like the FBI has been told to stay clear while ACORN steals our elections and miscounts our census.

[fiscon1]

acorn doesn’t actually commit any voter fraud. That’s a common misconception. They register people that don’t exist. Those people don’t vote. they actually are committing fraud against those that pay them to register people but that isn’t voter fraud. One of the reasons that ACORN is able to operate so effectively is because their opponents always mischaracterize what they do. By casually throwing out a falsehood like they commit voter fraud, which they don’t, you contribute to that. ACORN then complains that their enemies accuse them of things they don’t do, which you are.

What you just did was play right into their hands.

[ETL]

They also pay people for registering to vote, in some case, two, three, four, times.

[fiscon1]

There’s just evidence of that. Again, if you accuse them of things they don’t do, then you play into their hands. When they register Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse isn’t going to vote, because he isn’t real. Someone paid to have Mickey Mouse registered and that group has been defrauded. That’s the fraud.

[ETL]

NUTS! [ACORN scam]
By JEANE MacINTOSH, Post Correspondent

October 9, 2008 —

CLEVELAND - Two Ohio voters, including Domino’s pizza worker Christopher Barkley , claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they’d already signed up.

Barkley estimated he’d registered to vote “10 to 15” times after canvassers for ACORN, whose political wing has endorsed Barack Obama, relentlessly pursued him and others.

Claims such as his have sparked election officials to probe ACORN.

“I kept getting approached by folks who asked me to register,” Barkley said. “They’d ask me if I was registered. I’d say yes, and they’d ask me to do it [register] again.

“Some of them were getting paid to collect names. That was their sob story, and I bought it,” he said.

Barkley is one of at least three people who have been subpoenaed by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections as part of a wider inquiry into possible voter fraud by ACORN. The group seeks to register low-income voters, who skew overwhelmingly Democratic.

“You can tell them you’re registered as many times as you want - they do not care,” said Lateala Goins, 21, who was subpoenaed.

“They will follow you to the buses, they will follow you home, it does not matter,” she told The Post.

She added that she never put down an address on any of the registration forms, just her name.

A third subpoenaed voter, Freddie Johnson, 19, filled out registration cards 72 times over 18 months, officials said.

“It feeds the public perception that there could be [fraud], and that makes the pillars fall down,” said local Board of Elections President Jeff Hastings.

Registering under a fake name is illegal. But officials usually catch multiple registrations and toss them.

The major risk of fraud growing out of mass canvassing involves the possibility of ineligible voters filing absentee ballots, and thus avoiding checks at polling places, said Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross.

The subpoenas come as Republicans have ramped up criticism of ACORN. Officials in Nevada raided ACORN’s Las Vegas office Tuesday, accusing the group of signing people up multiple times - in some cases under phony names, like those of Dallas Cowboys.

ACORN’s Cleveland spokesman, Kris Harsh, said his group collected 100,000 voter-registration cards; only about 50 were questionable, he claimed.

As for workers, “We watch them like a hawk,” he said.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10092008/news/politics/nuts__132771.htm

[ETL]

ACORN & the Money Tree
Taxpayer money helps fund voter fraud.

By Meghan Clyne
October 31, 2004

Reports of voter-registration fraud are tiresomely commonplace. From the 6,000 ineligible felons listed on Colorado's voter rolls, to the cocaine offered in exchange for registrations from Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy in Ohio, this year's swing states have already seen unprecedentedly corrupt get-out-the-vote efforts.

This is especially true in Florida, where the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is the subject of a state investigation for potentially criminal voter-registration activity.

THE MONEY TREE

Although ACORN's projects run a wide gamut, the group claims as its purpose helping low- and middle-income Americans — through initiatives ranging from improving urban public schools, to providing counseling on how to avoid "predatory lending," to increasing the availability of "affordable housing." Most of these programs are conducted locally, by state-level ACORN organizations — which are often set up as 501(c)3 nonprofit entities distinct from the national ACORN umbrella, a 501(c)4 lobbying organization. Sounds benign enough — except that, according to Bob Huberty, executive vice president of the Capital Research Center, these tax-exempt 501(c)3s "have no reason for existence other than to get grants from the government and foundations." They are, essentially, an ACORN front for asking Uncle Sam to subsidize political activity.

Ask ACORN does — and it definitely receives. Take, for example, the most recent tax information from one of ACORN's subsidiary nonprofits: the ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc., based out of the organization's national headquarters in New Orleans. For the tax year beginning July 1, 2002, and ending June 30, 2003, ACORN Housing Corp.'s 990 Form shows a total of $1,710,203 received in government grants (the year before, the total was $1,977,306).

The nominal purpose of those millions is to "provide low rent housing & loan counseling services to low income individuals." But if the government is funding the actual, legitimate work of ACORN at the local 501(c)3 level, it means that the national lobbying organization can dedicate more of its unrestricted resources to electioneering. Furthermore, explains Craig Garthwaite, director of research at the Employment Policies Institute, "The funding is not only fungible in that if they receive money for X, they can spend more on Y." He cites one particular example of money-rerouting malfeasance: the crooked dealings surrounding an AmeriCorps grant in 1996. According to an EPI study, when the ACORN Housing Corp. applied for the grant, they denied any connections to the main ACORN lobbying group (the grant is not for political advocacy). But the AmeriCorps inspector general discovered that "not only was AHC created by ACORN, engaged in numerous transactions with one another, and sharing staff and office space — but it utilized the AmeriCorps grant to increase ACORN membership, a violation of federal guidelines." (ACORN charges membership dues, much as labor unions do; thus, by exploiting AmeriCorps funding to inflate its membership rolls, ACORN used government resources to bring in even more money — money with no restrictions on its political use.)

A SHADY PAST . . .

Given that federal funding is used "flexibly" within the ACORN empire, what kind of return is the government getting on its investment? Historically, failed 1960s-style leftism, intimidation and rabble-rousing, and questionable business practices — and hypocrisy. The EPI study documents ACORN's involvement in an $850,000 labor-union embezzlement scheme in the late 1990s; in 2003, ACORN was found to have violated the National Labor Relations Act and was ordered to "rehire and pay restitution to employees terminated for attempting to form a union." (ACORN's in-house union-busting starkly contradicts its prescriptions for private-sector unionization, and is especially two-faced considering that ACORN's chief organizer and co-founder — Wade Rathke — is also the chief organizer of Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union in New Orleans.)

ACORN's hypocrisy also extends to its stand on the minimum wage. While it has often attempted to force minimum-wage increases on private businesses through ballot initiatives and local ordinances, ACORN tried to exempt itself from California's minimum-wage requirements. According to EPI, "ACORN argued that being forced to pay higher wages would mean that they would hire fewer employees — the very dilemma faced by businesses. Incredibly, ACORN stated that paying its employees a lower wage would allow them to be more sympathetic to the low- and moderate-income families they were attempting to help. ACORN argued that abiding by the state minimum wage would limit their ability to promote their agenda and would therefore be a violation of their First Amendment rights."

. . . AND A DARKER PRESENT

Fittingly, wage increases are the centerpiece of ACORN's current woes. This year, Florida's state organization is purportedly helping the indigent by pushing for a ballot initiative that would inflate the state's minimum wage. To oversee the campaign to make Amendment 5 binding law, Florida ACORN spawned the PAC Floridians For All.

Unfortunately, Floridians For All doesn't seem concerned with fair voting for all. In order to put a measure on the Florida ballot, one must collect 500,000 signatures; the catch, however, is that those signatures must belong to men and women registered to vote in Florida at the time they sign the petition forms. So Floridians For All, in the process of collecting signatures statewide, had unsuspecting citizens fill out voter-registration paperwork along with the ballot-initiative petition forms. Mark Wilson, vice president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce and executive director of VoteSmartFlorida.org, explains: "In Florida, you must be a registered voter to sign a petition. But you're not registered to vote in Florida until a county supervisor runs you through the computer and says you are." So, says Wilson, Floridians For All "would turn in the voter registrations they'd collected on, say, a Monday, and then hold on to the accompanying petition forms for a couple of weeks before turning them in — so that by the time the petition forms hit the system, it looked like they belonged to people who had already registered to vote." According to Wilson, some petition forms were fraudulently post-dated by ACORN workers; he adds, however, that "they didn't even have to post-date them — handing them in late did the trick in making it look like they belonged to people who were properly registered."

Florida ACORN also registered thousands of felons — who, under Florida law, are ineligible to vote. They can, technically, apply for a restoration of civil rights; according to former Florida ACORN worker Mac Stuart — who has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against his ex-employer — ACORN exploited this hope in order to get felons to sign voter-registration cards. "We'd go up to them and say, 'Want your civil rights restored?' That's the pitch we were using. But those forms are not worth the paper they're printed on — there hasn't been any instance of clemency under the last two governors," Stuart claims. The forms became doubly worthless after Florida ACORN was through with them: "The restoration-of-civil-rights forms would go into the garbage," Stuart says. The voter-registration forms, however, were kept safe — as they were worth much more.

That's because each registration played a valuable part in Floridians For All's alleged pay-per-voter scheme. Stuart claims that Florida ACORN paid workers $2 for each voter registration they collected, and claims he has receipts to prove it. While it is permissible to pay an individual to register voters, "paying workers per registration," explains EPI spokesman Mike Burita, "is a felony in Florida — counted on a per-violation basis — so there could be thousands of crimes here."

A TANGLED WEB

Stuart's accusations suggest a process and cycle of kickbacks: "We'd go through colleges, malls, shopping strips, wherever there were people," collecting voter registrations. At the end of each week, he claims, "you made copies of the voter-registration forms — which was illegal. Once a form is signed, it's illegal to make copies of it.... From there, we'd send the copies to Project Vote [a national ACORN voter-registration arm, and yet another sub-group] in Brooklyn, and then Project Vote would send it to America's Families United [an independent 527 organization in Washington, D.C.]." In turn, AFU would send money back to Project Vote — initially $3.75 per voter registration, later increased to $4.10, according to Stuart.

"Project Vote would send me e-mails," claims Stuart, "with an allocation saying, 'We got X amount of money from America's Families United for Y number of cards.'" He says that Project Vote would then forward that money to Citizens Consulting, Inc., headquartered out of the same national ACORN building in New Orleans. (Coincidentally, CCI is, according to Garthwaite, run by the brother of ACORN head Wade Rathke.)

Stuart claims that CCI would then write a check to ACORN's Miami account — from which he would distribute the standard $2 per registration to Florida ACORN workers. Because Stuart, at the behest of ACORN, says he gave registration-gatherers only $2 per card — when America's Families United was sending $3.75 (and then $4.10) to ACORN for each voter registration obtained — every photocopied voter registration submitted earned ACORN a net profit of $1.75 (later $2.10) per registration.

NRO's requests for a comment in response to Stuart's allegations went unanswered. In other media, however, ACORN has dismissed the charges, blaming the individual whistleblower for any wrongdoing. This internal e-mail, however — in which Florida ACORN head organizer Brian Ketterning says Stuart is dangerous, "as he knows too much" — suggests that ACORN may, in fact, have something damaging to hide.

NONPARTISAN?

Granted, Amendment 5 did have other, non-monetary purposes. While Ketterning acquired funding for Floridians For All on the explicit promise that it was promoting a nonpartisan minimum-wage ballot initiative, a copy of Floridians For All's own campaign plan indicates otherwise.

The first paragraph of the plan reads:

A Florida constitutional amendment initiative to create a minimum wage of $6.15 with indexing will help defeat George W. Bush and other Republicans by increasing Democratic turnout in a close election, will deliver wage gains to at least 300,000 Floridians, and will catalyze the construction of permanent progressive political infrastructure that will help redirect Florida politics in a more progressive, Democratic direction

(emphasis added).

Later:

Given that turnout is down when the economy is bad, since our voters are more discouraged, the need for a exciting ballot initiative strategy that works to address the needs of the most economically needy, and also likely Democratic voters, is a fundamental part of a winning strategy in Florida.

Not exactly a nonpartisan effort prioritizing the minimum wage.

Perhaps this explains the $250,000, $25,000, and another $25,000 in donations to Floridians For All from the National Education Association, MoveOn.org, and SEIU, respectively, as well as Nancy Pelosi's awareness efforts in Floridians For All's behalf. (Interestingly enough, Floridians For All also received $150,000 from the Tides Foundation — on whose board of directors Wade Rathke serves, and to which Teresa Heinz Kerry and her foundation contribute.) Hundreds of thousands of dollars from national left-leaning organizations, and the attentions of the House Minority Leader, seem out of place for an ordinary state ballot initiative — out of place, that is, until you realize that Floridians For All and Florida ACORN do not consider the minimum wage their main priority. It makes much more sense for MoveOn.org, the NEA, SEIU, and Nancy Pelosi to turn out for a massive effort to defeat George W. Bush in Florida — to avenge 2000, and secure one of 2004's most-watched swing states.

In the course of its crusade to defeat the president and establish a Democratic stronghold, ACORN faces remarkable allegations: taking license with its internal bookkeeping; gathering and filing illegitimate petition forms; forging signatures; destroying voter-registration applications and other official documents entrusted to its care; profiting from illegal pay-per-vote schemes; lying to potential donors; abusing a state constitution for national-level partisan exploits; vilifying conscientious employees; and disenfranchising hundreds, and possibly thousands, of citizens.

And — if it's all true — that's just in Florida, itself only a small part of ACORN's antics nationwide.

And those antics are supported by Uncle Sam's dime.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/clyne200410311142.asp

[lilylangtree]

ACORN & its subsidiaries MUST be stopped.

[fiscon1]

yes, and how exactly was the same person going to vote several times. They registered these people several times because someone paid them for each registered voter. That same person was only going to vote once. Again, the fraud is different than the one you think it is. I am not saying this isn’t fraud, it just isn’t voter fraud. When you accuse them of things they haven’t done, you play into their hands.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I don’t follow your argument at all.

[AuntB]

Bump for later read. Thanks.

[ETL]

I am not saying this isn’t fraud, it just isn’t voter fraud. When you accuse them of things they haven’t done, you play into their hands.

You're right, it isn't 'technically' voter fraud. And that's all the left-wing media would run with.

[ETL]

By casually throwing out a falsehood like they commit voter fraud, which they don’t, you contribute to that. ACORN then complains that their enemies accuse them of things they don’t do

Check out these Yahoo search results for "voter fraud" "acorn". That's exactly what is happening (they are crying 'false charges').
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22voter+fraud%22%22acorn%22&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2

[sweetiepiezer]

bbbt

[fiscon1]

Voter fraud is something very specific. It’s when someone votes claiming to be someone that they aren’t, or claiming to live somewhere they don’t, etc. What ACORN has done is something different. Then, they sit back and allow their enemies to accuse them of voter fraud, and watch their enemies lose credibility.