It never ends. I can almost guarantee that this election will not be over until 2009 with the rampant voter fraud
Posts Tagged ‘voter fraud’
Over 30,000 Felons Registered in Florida
October 13, 2008More than 30,000 Florida felons who by law should have been stripped of their right to vote remain registered to cast ballots in this presidential battleground state, a Sun Sentinel investigation has found.
Many are faithful voters, with at least 4,900 turning out in past elections.
Another 5,600 are not likely to vote Nov. 4 — they’re still in prison.
Of the felons who registered with a party, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.
Florida’s elections chief, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, acknowledged his staff has failed to remove thousands of ineligible felons because of a shortage of workers and a crush of new registrations in this critical swing state.
Browning said he was not surprised by the newspaper’s findings. “I’m kind of shocked that the number is as low as it is,” he said.
Asked how many ineligible felons may be on Florida’s rolls, Browning said, “We don’t know.”
Just keeps coming
Ohio Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner Violated Federal Election Law
October 10, 2008Thanks to MM:
It turns out that a federal court has found that Jennifer Brunner vioated federal law in her attempt to get unlimited voter registrations on the rolls. Chickens is coming home to roost.
A federal court ruled tonight that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner violated federal election laws by not taking adequate steps to validate the identity of newly registered voters.
The ruling from U.S. District Court Judge George C. Smith called the identification breakdown “a serious problem” and ordered Brunner to immediately comply with federal requirements to match voter registration data with the information in the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Social Security Administration databases. The court accused Brunner of failing to provide county election administrators with “an effective way to access and review mismatches.” She immediately appealed the ruling.
“For some reason, Jennifer Brunner does not want these new registrations checked,” said Ohio Republican Party Deputy Chairman Kevin DeWine. “Her refusal to comply with federal law raises serious concerns about her ability to objectively oversee this election. It’s especially troubling in light of her connection to ACORN and that group’s stunning confession this week of fraudulent registration activity happening right here in Ohio.”
Brunner’s effort to fight the court order comes just two days after the Democrat activist group ACORN admitted to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that the group engages in fraudulent voter registration activity.
Ohio ACORN officials “blamed the elections board for not scrutinizing ACORN’s suspicious cards,” claiming the group “can’t be expected to catch everything.”
ACORN is facing similar inquires in other Ohio counties as well as 10 other states. Members of the group’s “voter-mobilization arm,” Project Vote, regularly advise Brunner on election strategy, even recently issuing a news release that claims credit for Brunner’s directive restricting challenges to suspected fraudulent voter registrations. Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama also has strong ties to ACORN, working previously as an attorney and “leadership trainer” for the group.
An Ohio history:
The Columbus Dispatch, 5/9/07: In what might be a Franklin County first, a Reynoldsburg man was indicted yesterday for voting twice in the November election. … [An attorney] said Gilbert was registered in both counties by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a nonprofit agency that has come under fire in 12 states for voter fraud.
Associated Press, 9/20/06: The mother of a 16-year-old has told the Summit County elections board that her daughter was registered to vote, just two months after a 10-year-old boy was summoned for jury duty because he was on the county’s voter rolls. …The board plans to issue subpoenas to the girl and the person who filed the voter registration application, Prentice McNary of Akron, a circulator paid by Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, [board director Bryan] Williams said.
The Columbus Dispatch, 9/1/06: Concerns about bogus names increased recently as Franklin County Elections Board staffers questioned the validity of hundreds of names on registration forms and petitions for a proposed constitutional amendment to boost Ohio’s minimum wage. Most of the disputed names came from lists provided by paid solicitors working for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
The Columbus Dispatch, 8/30/06: Franklin County elections officials plan to issue subpoenas to paid solicitors suspected of forging hundreds of signatures on ballot-issue petitions and voter-registration forms. … Most have come from people paid by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which was blamed for similar problems with voter-registration forms in 2004.
The Plain Dealer, 8/11/06: Potentially fraudulent voter registration cards have turned up in at least three Ohio counties, and 500 have been turned over to a prosecutor to determine if a crime has been committed. Matt Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said the 500 cards his office referred to County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien Wednesday were collected between March and July by workers for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/23/04: Cuyahoga County election officials are investigating more than a thousand possible fraudulent voter registrations – including one for Jive Turkey Sr. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Friday that the name is one in a string of fake names on new voter rolls. Others include Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins and Michael Jordan in Defiance County.
The Columbus Dispatch, 9/8/04: A part-time worker signing up new voters for a local community group has been indicted by a Franklin County grand jury on charges he forged a registration form. … The charges stem from an investigation that began in May after the Franklin County Board of Elections discovered dozens of voter registration forms with fake names or false information. They were submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which paid workers bonuses based on the number of voters they registered.
The Columbus Dispatch, 6/3/04: A nonprofit group registering low-income and minority voters in Franklin County has fired two temporary workers thought to be the source of fake names and forged signatures on official registration forms. ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also has agreed to perform extra checks on forms turned in by its voter-registration workers before submitting them to the Franklin County Board of Elections, the group’s head organizer said yesterday.
NYPost: How ACORN Got Me Into Vote Scam
October 9, 2008It just doesn’t end.
Jeane MacIntosh from NYPost:
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.
ACORN News Steamrolling Ahead
October 9, 2008Lots of news today:
For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for “advance work.”)
What’s more, Obama worked as executive director of ACORN’s voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other community organizers on Chicago’s South Side, Obama conducted the voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Senate that year.
The next year, 1993, Obama joined the civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal “Motor Voter” law, which the GOP governor at the time refused to do. Then-Gov. Jim Edgar argued, presciently, that the Clinton law would invite voter fraud.
Obama downplays his ties to ACORN, and his campaign denies coordinating with ACORN to register voters.
Yesterday, we gave you a run down of Connecticut, Ohio an Wisconsin, now there is more:
LaSota said Monday representatives of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a grassroots activist group conducting registration drives, dropped off 2,000 new voter applications last week in Lake County.
“About 1,100 are no good,” she said.
LaSota said the flawed forms are incomplete or contain unreadable handwriting — similar to hundreds of other forms ACORN produced prior to this week. She said some ACORN vote canvassers apparently pulled names and addresses from telephone books and forged signatures.
Charles Jackson, communications director for ACORN, said Monday its administrators screened out the 1,100 registration forms in question and warned county officials the documents were suspect. He said ACORN left the final decision to discard the forms to county officials.
He said ACORN has fired and reported to law enforcement any employees suspected of vote fraud.
“We consider it stealing from ACORN,” Jackson said.
Lake County Republican Chairman John Curley said Monday the ACORN registration drive is the main reason he opposes the opening of early voting centers in Gary, Hammond and East Chicago.
He filed a lawsuit last week in state and federal courts to stop the three branch offices from opening Monday. County officials agreed last week to delay opening the early locations until U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Van Bokkelen rules on the matter later this week.
Curley said opening too many early voting locations would strain the county election staff’s efforts to stop people from using fraudulent registrations.
Jay Kenworth, a spokesman for the Indiana Republican Party said Monday, “We are obviously deeply disturbed by the news of these fraudulent registrations.”
The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Most polls show Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an edge in bellwether Missouri, but Democrat Barack Obama continues to put up a strong fight.
Jess Ordower, Midwest director of ACORN, said his group hasn’t done any registrations in Kansas City since late August. He said he was told three weeks ago by election officials that there were only about 135 questionable cards — 85 of them duplicates.
“They keep telling different people different things,” he said. “They gave us a list of 130, then told someone else it was 1,000.”
FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said the agency has been in contact with elections officials about potential voter fraud and plans to investigate.
“It’s a matter we take very seriously,” Patton said. “It is against the law to register someone to vote who does not fall within the parameters to vote, or to put someone on there falsely.”
On Tuesday, authorities in Nevada seized records from ACORN after finding fraudulent registration forms that included the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.
In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.
Ordower said Wednesday that ACORN registered about 53,500 people in Missouri this year. He believes his group is being targeted because some politicians don’t want that many low-income people having a voice.
“It’s par for the course,” he said. “When you’re doing more registrations than anyone else in the country, some don’t want low-income people being empowered to vote. There are pretty targeted attacks on us, but we’re proud to be out there doing the patriotic thing getting people registered to vote.”
Republicans are among ACORN’s loudest critics. At a campaign stop in Bethlehem, Pa., supporters of John McCain interrupted his remarks Wednesday by shouting, “No more ACORN.”
Keep up to date at hotair and michelle also. This is the story that keeps on giving. It has obviously gotten to the Messiah’s head also. Yesterday, in Indiana, he gaffed “an ACORN doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
ACORN-apalooza – Voter Fraud a-plenty!
October 8, 2008Lots and lots and lots of ACORN stuff today.
First, let’s visit Wisconsin, where in 2004, ACORN slashed tires intended to drive voters to the polls. From the Journal-sentinel
Milwaukee County prosecutors Tuesday charged a convicted felon with illegally registering himself and others to vote between his conviction and his sentencing.
The complaint accuses Adam Mucklin, 22, of registering to vote in June, after he was convicted of battery in April, and after a judge told him he couldn’t vote as a convicted felon. Later in June, Mucklin signed up to work as a paid voter registrar for the Community Voters Project, something else he couldn’t do as a convicted felon, the complaint says.
A recent opinion from the staff of the state Government Accountability Board says no one convicted of a felony can ever serve as a registrar, a stricter standard than the previous interpretation that registrars only had to be eligible to vote.
[...]
Mucklin was among 49 voter registration workers who were referred to the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office by the Milwaukee Election Commission on suspicion of election fraud. He is the second to be charged.
———
Back to Ohio, they can’t be totally fraud free, who would expect that?
Voter-registration group cites lack of resources
A national voter-registration group admitted to Cuyahoga County election officials Tuesday that it cannot eliminate fraud from its operation.
The group blamed inefficiency and lack of resources for problems such as being unable to spot duplicate voter-registration cards or cards that may have been filled out by workers to make quotas.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has turned in at least 65,000 cards to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in the last year. The board has investigated potentially fraudulent cards since August.
HARTFORD — The State Elections Enforcement Commission has opened an investigation into allegations that a community activist organization submitted at least 10 false voter-registration cards in Bridgeport.
One of the phony registrations was for a 7-year-old girl in the Marina Village housing complex, whose age was listed as 27 on the voter card.
Another registration came from a man who later said he couldn’t have completed the voter card purported to be his because he was in jail on the date of the document.
Day’s not ove – let’s see what else comes down the pipeline
Obama Claims He Never Worked For ACORN
October 8, 2008Thanks to Sweetness and Light for finding this
On Obama’s Fight the Smears rapid respponse website, it notes:
Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN
Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.
• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called “Motor Voter,” Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995…
However…
What Makes Obama Run?
Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack Obama doesn’t need another career. But he’s entering politics to get back to his true passion–community organization.
By Hank De Zutter
December 8, 1995… Another strong supporter of Obama’s work–as an organizer, as a lawyer, and now as a candidate–is Madeline Talbott, lead organizer of the feisty ACORN community organization, a group that’s a thorn in the side of most elected officials. “I can’t repeat what most ACORN members think and say about politicians. But Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”
Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side. Conducting a session in a New Horizons classroom, Obama, tall and thin, looks very much like an Ivy League graduate student. Dressed casually prep, his tie loosened and his top shirt button unfastened, he leads eight black women from the Grand Boulevard community through a discussion of “what folks should know” about who in Chicago has power and why they have it. It’s one of his favorite topics, and the class bubbles with suggestions about how “they” got to be high and mighty…
That’s cute, in addition:
Project Vote is the voter-mobilization arm of ACORN. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose professed purpose is to carry out “non-partisan” voter registration drives; to counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of voting rights — focusing on the rights of the poor and the “disenfranchised.” …
and…
Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. 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, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).
ACORN is rearin its ugly head across the country. I didn’t think this would play out, but it looks like it might
Michelle also has an article about the thug thizzle and ACORN fraud across America:
In addition to the Las Vegas raid, fraud allegations keep piling up:
— Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected a large portion of the 5,000 registration forms ACORN turned in after conducting registration drives in the area all summer. Some vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from telephone books and forged signatures. According to local reports, “large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style” and “apparently the organization’s canvassers broke rules to meet ACORN-set voter registration quotas to get paid.” The fake registrants included dead people and underage kids.
On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 voter applications were no good — tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen.
– Last month, Milwaukee, Wis., officials discovered at least seven felons employed as voter registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter registration cards. The state GOP accused ACORN of attempting to enroll dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to voter rolls. Fraud has plagued ACORN’s Milwaukee chapter since the last election cycle.
– In Florida, in Orange County alone, ACORN workers turned in multiple copycat forms for six separate voters over the summer. According to the Miami Herald, “One individual had 21 duplicate applications.”
Election officials had flagged ACORN’s negligent practices several months ago, but it may be too late: In Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, ACORN has signed up 135,000 new voters, nearly 60 percent of them registered as Democrats that constitute a fifth of all new voters in that region.
– In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people received free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling prospects to the polls. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who told her ACORN “told her who to vote for if she wanted a ‘better life,’ and told her not to worry about jury duty (one of the reasons this homeless woman didn’t want to register) because the government probably wouldn’t be able to track her down. She was registering with a temporary address.”
More ACORN Goodness
October 8, 2008Lookie here, the search warrant for the ACORN Nevada raid has come online.
The last sentence of the first paragraph is priceless – lazy crack-heads.
Here is a little more info on the bust from the Las Vegas Sun
No one has been arrested.
ACORN’s interim chief organizer Bertha Lewis released a statement calling the Secretary of State’s office raid “a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than [to] discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible vote to the polls.”
ACORN had received a subpoena dated Sept. 19 requesting information on 15 employees, all of whose names had been included in packages previously submitted to election officials, Lewis said. ACORN provided its personnel records on the 15 employees on Sept. 29, she said.
“For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application in to election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual,” Lewis said. “Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act.”
ACORN representatives met with election officials and a representative of the Secretary of State’s office on July 17 and were asked to provide a second copy of documents previously provided, she said. She said ACORN gave officials copies of 46 application packages, which involved 33 former canvassers.
In a 19-page affidavit by criminal investigator Colin Hayes of the Secretary of State’s office, Hayes said 59 inmates worked for ACORN between March 5 and July 31.
One ex-employee of ACORN, Jason Anderson, rose to the rank of a supervisor in the voter registration program although he was a convicted felon and an inmate at Casa Grande at the time, the affidavit said.
In addition to the records ACORN had given state officials, Clark County election workers discovered another 183 suspicious files, each with different voters’ names, the affidavit said. In some cases, dozens of people had no records in Nevada, or addresses didn’t exist, the affidavit said.
ACORN office raided in Las Vegas
October 7, 2008The ACORN office in Las Vegas was raided this morning after a warrant was issued and served. ACORN is being investigated for voter fraud in the state of NV. ACORN is on the payroll by the Obama campaign and had been paid to “get-the-vote-out”. There will likely be more breaking information later, but here is the information I could find. Nevada is a swing state once again in this year’s election.
Just Chicago politics, once again, rearing its ugly head via its new hopeful giant The Messiah himself, Obama
-Reagan21
MORE: by way of MM
Agents with the state attorney general’s and secretary of state’s offices served a search warrant this morning on the new ACORN headquarters. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now office is located at 953 E. Sahara Ave.
The warrant was part of an ongoing investigation into suspected voter registration fraud. Employees are suspected of using false addresses or false names, including those of former Dallas Cowboys, according to the secretary of state’s office.
Fighting Back in Ohio
October 3, 2008From Michelle
Republicans have won a round with Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in what’s turned into an ongoing dispute over voting procedures.
A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday, Oct. 2, ordered Brunner to tell county boards of elections not to reject applications for absentee ballots because of an unmarked box next to next to a statement that the applicant is a qualified elector.
“No vital public purpose or public interest is served by rejecting electors’ applications for absentee ballots because of an unmarked check box next to a qualified-elector statement,” the Supreme Court decision said.
The absentee ballot applications in question were supplied by Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign. Other application forms for absentee ballots don’t include the boxes.
Not a big win, but a win
