Acorn, some facts for a change

[midcan5]

The right wing bogeyman ACORN tries to make sure the poor and the minorities have a voice in America. This is a good thing, as the conservative nanny state for the wealthy has changed the country for the worse ever since Reagan began the war on the middle class working American. Of course it is controversial to the wingnuts, they worship greed and money. Regular people and their right to a fair and level playing field need a voice too. For too long only the rich have had power and you see clearly today the effect that has had.

The Truth About ACORN's Voter Registration Drive

by Bertha Lewis and Steve Kest

Election Day is less than a month away, and our efforts to make sure that low-income and minority voters have a voice and vote on November 4th are in full swing. Unfortunately, just as we've seen in previous election cycles, the more success we have in empowering these voters, the more attacks we have to fend off from partisan forces making unfounded accusations to disparage our work and help maintain the status quo of an unbalanced electorate. We want to take this opportunity to separate the facts of our successes from the falsehoods of our attackers."

www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/10

[angrypuppy]

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 worker--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.”
deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/14/1544574.aspx

[angrypuppy]

Here's One from May 29th, 2008

Inside Obama’s Acorn
By their fruits ye shall know them.

By Stanley Kurtz

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.
This is a story we’ve largely missed. While Obama’s Acorn connection has not gone entirely unreported, its depth, extent, and significance have been poorly understood. Typically, media background pieces note that, on behalf of Acorn, Obama and a team of Chicago attorneys won a 1995 suit forcing the state of Illinois to implement the federal “motor-voter” bill. In fact, Obama’s Acorn connection is far more extensive. In the few stories where Obama’s role as an Acorn “leadership trainer” is noted, or his seats on the boards of foundations that may have supported Acorn are discussed, there is little follow-up. Even these more extensive reports miss many aspects of Obama’s ties to Acorn.

An Anti-Capitalism Agenda
To understand the nature and extent of Acorn’s radicalism, an excellent place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” (For a shorter but helpful piece, try Steven Malanga’s “Acorn Squash.”)

Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

While Acorn holds to NWRO’s radical economic framework and its confrontational 1960’s-style tactics, the targets and strategy have changed. Acorn prefers to fly under the national radar, organizing locally in liberal urban areas — where, Stern observes, local legislators and reporters are often “slow to grasp how radical Acorn’s positions really are.” Acorn’s new goals are municipal “living wage” laws targeting “big-box” stores like Wal-Mart, rolling back welfare reform, and regulating banks — efforts styled as combating “predatory lending.” Unfortunately, instead of helping workers, Acorn’s living-wage campaigns drive businesses out of the very neighborhoods where jobs are needed most. Acorn’s opposition to welfare reform only threatens to worsen the self-reinforcing cycle of urban poverty and family breakdown. Perhaps most mischievously, says Stern, Acorn uses banking regulations to pressure financial institutions into massive “donations” that it uses to finance supposedly non-partisan voter turn-out drives.

According to Stern, Acorn’s radical agenda sometimes shifts toward “undisguised authoritarian socialism.” Fully aware of its living-wage campaign’s tendency to drive businesses out of cities, Acorn hopes to force companies that want to move to obtain “exit visas.” “How much longer before Acorn calls for exit visas for wealthy or middle-class individuals before they can leave a city?” asks Stern, adding, “This is the road to serfdom indeed.”

In Your Face
Acorn’s tactics are famously “in your face.” Just think of Code Pink’s well-known operations (threatening to occupy congressional offices, interrupting the testimony of General David Petraeus) and you’ll get the idea. Acorn protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and Acorn has burst into a closed city council meeting there. Acorn protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers’ dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor’s home, terrifying his wife and kids. Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports Acorn said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.

article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDZiMjkwMDczZWI5ODdjOWYxZTIzZGIyNzEyMjE0ODI=

[angrypuppy]

Multiple registrants tell Cuyahoga County Elections Board ACORN workers begged for signatures
Pair signed multiple vote cards for ACORN
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Joe Guillen
Plain Dealer Reporter
Teenager Freddie Johnson said he was offered smokes and dollar bills to fill out voter registration cards.

And now the Cuyahoga County Elections Board has 73 cards with Johnson's name on them.

Johnson and another prolific registrant were subpoenaed to testify at a meeting Monday as the Elections Board continued its look at possible fraud by ACORN, a national organization that tries to get low- and moderate-income people to register. ACORN's methods have drawn interest in a number of states this presidential election year.

Johnson, 19, said he mostly was trying to help ACORN workers who begged him to sign up because they needed to keep their jobs.

"They'd come up with a sob story why they needed the signature," said Johnson, of Garfield Heights.

ACORN leaders have acknowledged that workers paid by the hour were given quotas to fill.

Board member Sandy McNair said ACORN did not do a competent job carrying out its business plan. Members, in fact, said little about ACORN. And they turned their investigation over to the county sheriff and prosecutor.

A second person to testify, Christopher Barkley, 33, said ACORN workers pestered him while they tried to gather signatures.

Barkley, of Cleveland, said he was homeless and reading a book on Public Square when he signed some of the 13 cards that contain his name. He filled out cards - with his mother's house or workplace as the address - to help workers stay employed.

"Me being a kind-hearted person, I said 'Yeah,' " Barkley recalled.

www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1223973289273860.xml&coll=2

[angrypuppy]

Vote drives defended, despite fake names
By Richard Danielson, Times Staff Writer
In print: Tuesday, October 14, 2008


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer, but Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which had an ACORN stamp on it.

Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer.

Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which was stamped with the logo of the nonprofit group ACORN.

Tow truck driver Newton Bell did register to vote in Orange County this summer. In the hands of ACORN, his paperwork went through without a hitch.

Two cases, two outcomes, each with a connection to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Nationwide, ACORN is a favorite GOP target for allegations of voter registration fraud this year.

That's not new. Similar complaints followed the 2004 elections. A criminal investigation in Florida found no evidence of fraud. ACORN even has a cameo role in the scandal over the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Department.

Under attack again, ACORN leaders defend their work. Often, they say, things are as not simple as they're portrayed.

Take Mickey Mouse.

Yes, that's their logo. But they say their workers routinely scanned all suspicious applications.

"We don't think this card came through our system," said Brian Kettenring, ACORN's head organizer in Florida.

With more than 450,000 member families nationwide — 14,000 in Florida — ACORN is a grass roots advocacy group focused on health care, wages, affordable housing and foreclosure.

Bell, the truck driver, certainly, is more representative of ACORN's work in Florida than the cartoon mouse is.

This year, ACORN signed up 1.3-million voters nationwide and about 152,000 in Florida, mostly in Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ACORN estimates it flagged 2 percent of its Florida registrations as problematic because they were incomplete, duplicates or just plain bogus.

That's enough to give headaches to election officials and to provide ammunition to Republican activists.

Brevard County elections officials have turned over 23 suspect registrations from ACORN to prosecutors. The state Division of Elections has received two ACORN-related complaints, in Orange and Broward counties.

ACORN wasn't active in the Tampa Bay area. Last week, however, Pinellas County elections officials gave local prosecutors 35 questionable registrations from another group, Work for Progress.

The GOP accuses ACORN of registration fraud all over the country. In Las Vegas, authorities said the group's petitions included the names of the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

"This is part of a widespread and systemic effort … to undermine the election process," says Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross, who describes ACORN as a "quasicriminal organization."

No, Kettenring said, it's more like Wal-Mart.

"Some percentage of Wal-Mart workers try to get paid without doing their work or steal from their employer," he said.

Some ACORN workers, he said, have simply made up names.

Maybe, elections officials say, but it's still annoying.

"We did experience a significant amount of problems, enough that we did contact the group to express some of our frustration with their work," said Linda Tanko, Orange County's senior deputy supervisor for voter services.

ACORN's problems included applications with unreadable handwriting, missing information, signatures that didn't match those on file, altered dates of birth or Social Security numbers, applications for people already registered to vote and names that appeared repeatedly, often with different addresses.

ACORN said it terminates canvassers who forge applications. In Broward County, it fired one worker after he turned in applications with similar handwriting and brought the matter to the attention of the Supervisor of Elections Office.

Pay to gather registrations started at $8 an hour, and the goal was 20 signups per day. The organization did not pay by the signature or pay bonuses for volume. The organization also tried to follow up on each registration, calling the person listed to confirm that the form is accurate.

In most states, ACORN must turn in every form that is filled out. "We must turn in every voter registration card by Florida law, even Mickey Mouse," Kettenring said.

Well, not yet, said Jennifer Krell Davis, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State.

Florida does have a law saying third-party voter registration groups must turn in every form without regard to things like party affiliation, race, ethnicity or gender. So far, however, the state has not written the rules to implement it.

In Florida, ACORN is best known for its 2004 effort to lead a petition drive to raise the minimum wage. The FDLE looked into voter fraud allegations then and found no laws were broken.

ACORN also played a role in the firing of one of nine U.S. attorneys dismissed in 2006.

In New Mexico, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired "because of complaints by elected officials who had a political interest in the outcome" of, among other things, a Republican voter fraud complaint against ACORN, according to an internal Justice Department report last month.

This year, 39 members of the House of Representatives have asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate ACORN.

One of those, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, also has written to supervisor of elections offices in Central Florida seeking "all ACORN-related registration of voters within the last two years."

Republicans also accuse Sen. Barack Obama of trying to distance himself from ACORN, which he represented in a federal lawsuit in 1995.

ACORN's political action committee has endorsed Obama, but the group says its voter registration efforts are nonpartisan.

And the McCain campaign's complaints now are puzzling, ACORN says, because two years ago McCain was the keynote speaker at an immigration reform rally ACORN co-sponsored in Miami. "In 2006," Kettenring said, "we were working together."

www.tampabay.com/news/politics/elections/article852295.ece

[angrypuppy]

BOGUS VOTER BOOTED AMID PROBE OF ACORN
4,000 OF LEFT-WING GROUP'S SIGN-UPS ARE SHADY
Comments: 227Read Comments Leave a Comment By JEANE MacINTOSH in Cleveland and MAGGIE HABERMAN in New York
Click to enlargeLast updated: 10:11 am
October 14, 2008
Posted: 3:44 am
October 14, 2008

Investigators probing ACORN have learned that an Ohio man registered to vote several times and cast a bogus ballot with a fake address, officials said yesterday, as they revealed that nearly 4,000 registration applications supplied by the left-leaning activist group were suspect.

MORE: Mac Tries To Rally Troops

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OPINION: The O Jesse Knows

The vote of Darnell Nash, one of four people subpoenaed in a Cuyahoga County probe of ACORN's voter-registration activities, was canceled and his case was turned over to local prosecutors and law enforcement, Board of Elections officials said yesterday.

Nash had registered to vote repeatedly from an address that belonged to a legitimately registered voter, officials said during a hearing at which the subpoenaed voters were to testify.

Board officials had contacted Nash this summer, questioned his address and told him to stop repeat registering.

But still, he breezed into Ohio election offices - the state allows early voting for president - reregistered with a fake address and cast a paper ballot, officials said.

"He came in on 9/30 and Mr. Nash again registered to vote at [someone else's] address, and he cast a ballot," said board official Jane Platten.

Nash did not turn up for the hearing.

The Post reported last week on the Cleveland-area probe and the subpoenas, which were sent out to four people - including two voters who said they were hounded by ACORN workers to register over and over, even when they warned they'd already done so.

It's the latest issue in the probe of ACORN's registering voters in Ohio, one of at least nine states where officials are investigating similar reports of phony sign-ups by the group.

At the same time, officials said, some 5 percent, or 3,650, of the 73,000 total registration cards turned in by ACORN in the Cleveland area from its Project Vote initiative to sign up low-income voters were "questionable," Platten said.

There were "egregious acts of registering multiple times," said Platten. "The extent of it is beyond the resources of this board."

Nash's case and three others were turned over to authorities yesterday, said Ryan Miday, a spokesman for prosecutor Bill Masson.

"We will consider presenting it to a grand jury," Miday said.

A member of the board said if necessary, the FBI or federal prosecutors could be brought in for assistance.

Still, members of the bipartisan board downplayed any voter fraud.

And Platten insisted officials with ACORN have offered "any and all" help in probing the questionable activities. Katy Gall, the Ohio state director for ACORN, said her group is cooperating fully with the investigation.

She added that her group has fired anyone who was found soliciting duplicate registrations.

ACORN, whose political arm has endorsed Democratic nominee Barack Obama, has signed up more than 1.3 million voters for this cycle.

ACORN adviser Scott Levenson said, "If one of the 13,000 [people] we hired is potentially a bad apple in the bunch, we encourage the authorities to prosecute, as appropriate, anyone that did the wrong thing. We discipline [and] we fire workers who [abuse their position] . . . We encourage prosecutors to follow suit."

He also denied suggestions that the group pays canvassers by the number of names they sign up, and that they have quotas.

Also yesterday:

* Two of the four subpoenaed voters, Freddie Johnson and Christopher Barkley, met privately with sheriff's deputies and described what they'd told The Post about being hounded by ACORN workers. Barkley testified at the hearing that some of the registration cards listing his name weren't filled out by him.

* In an e-mail to supporters, John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, slammed "the left-wing activist group ACORN" and suggested, "We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election."

www.nypost.com/seven/10142008/news/politics/bogus_voter_booted_amid_probe_of_acorn_133540.htm

[angrypuppy]

So The Tax Payers are Funding This Circus. Felony seems so much more to the point than Nuisance. How many different ways can or does a Person Need to Register? DMV? State Offices? City Offices? On Line? Public Libraries (Might be a Good Idea)? Why should Anyone get paid with Tax Payer Money to register Voters? We Need Positive ID Requirements for Voters, and We Need to Cross Reference Voter Registration Rolls in Every State.

[midcan5]

Angry, URLS and snippets are all that is needed and legal. thanks

More on Acorn for the fair minded.

www.publicintegrity.org/blog/entry/885/?gclid=CP64pPeis5YCFQGHHgodcgShLw

[angrypuppy]

More on Acorn for the fair minded.
Just doing My Part in Running The Media Blockade on Current Events when The Current Events don't Fit the Elitist, Partisan Agenda. I will continue to do so.

McCain renews claims of voter fraud
By Andrew Ward in Washington

Published: October 20 2008 03:00 | Last updated: October 20 2008 03:00

Republicans are stepping up pressure on election authorities over alleged voter fraud by a grassroots group with past ties to Barack Obama, setting the stage for a potential legal battle should the Democrat win next month's election by a narrow margin.

Republican officials have launched a slew of lawsuits calling for tougher voter -verification measures in battleground states after John McCain, the party's presidential candidate, said the US could be facing "one of the greatest frauds in voter history".

Accusations of fraud against Acorn, a community activist group focused on low-income areas, have become a central theme of the McCain campaign, stirring anger among Republican voters and increasing scrutiny of efforts to increase black turnout.

Acorn claims to have registered 1.3m new voters - many African-American - in more than 20 states this year, using an army of volunteers paid to sign up voters in poor neighbourhoods.

Republicans claim many of the registrations are bogus, pointing to cases of individuals signing up multiple times and others involving fake names including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Democrats accuse their opponents of exaggerating the scale of irregularities to intimidate election authorities and fan racial fears among white voters.

Arguments are fiercest in Ohio, the state that decided the 2004 election, where Democratic officials admit that up to a third of the 600,000 new registrations made this year have some kind of discrepancy.

In a setback for Republicans, the US Supreme Court on Friday threw out a bid by the party to force Ohio to verify suspicious registrations before the election.

But Republican officials have promised to keep up pressure on the state. "The Democrats have proven once again they'd rather steal elections than win them fairly," said Bob Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican party, accusing the state's Democratic leadership of "actively working to conceal fraudulent activity".

Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's secretary of state, who oversees elections, said many of the 200,000 discrepancies involved minor typograph-ical errors.

Democrats argue that there are already enough checks in place to prevent people using bogus or mult-iple registrations to vote.

Republicans have used the issue to highlight Mr Obama's background as a community organiser in an African-American area of Chicago - a role that stirs suspicion among many conservative white voters.

The Obama campaign says it has no ties to Acorn but Mr Obama has worked closely with the group in the past and paid $800,000 to an affiliated organisation for voter canvassing services during the Democratic -primaries.

Acorn says its 87 offices have received hundreds of hostile e-mails since the dispute erupted, including death threats.

On Friday, Bob Bauer, the Obama campaign's senior lawyer, accused Republicans of recklessly "plotting" to suppress legitimate votes and to "sow confusion and harass voters and complicate the process for millions of Americans".

He accused the administration of politicising the dispute by leaking news of a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into Acorn and called for it to be handed to a special prosecutor.

An estimated 9m new voters have registered for next month's election and the Obama campaign says Democratic registrations are outpacing Republican ones by four to one.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f078d98c-9e3f-11dd-bdde-000077b07658.html

[angrypuppy]

More on ACORN for The Fair Minded.
It is Important to Distinguish between Voter Fraud and Voter Registration Fraud. Even though both Practices Effect the Integrity of The Voting Process, One is a Crime that Steals Elections, The Other, Costs are Administrative, cleaning the mess caused by Those with No Regard for the rest of Us. Who Pays the People that Solicit These Registrations? Is Federal Money involved? Is Soliciting Bribes in order to Register Voters a Crime? Is Bribing People to Vote a Crime? I Personally take My Voting Right Very Seriously and don't Appreciate Anyone that Corrupts the Concept of One Vote Per Qualified Voter. What determines the Qualification of Voters in a Free Society, is the Consent of The Governed. I think It is Important to Mention that, considering So many Kool-Aid drinkers are turning Their Backs on the Founding Principals.