http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12432392
INTEREST in the upcoming election is running high, and officials around the country have reported big surges in voter registration. But some of the new applicants do not pass muster. In Orlando, home to the Magic Kingdom of Disney, Mickey Mouse tried to register. In Indiana there was an application from a sandwich shop called Jimmy Johns. Authorities in Nevada were surprised to receive voter registration forms from the starting line-up of the Dallas Cowboys.
All these applications were provided by the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (ACORN), a group that works to register low-income voters. ACORN has been industrious this year, signing up 1.3m voters in 21 states according to its own tallies. But they have run into some trouble; thousands of their voter-registration applications are fakes. In Connecticut a seven-year-old girl applied. A man in Ohio admitted he had signed up with organisers more than 70 times in exchange for cash and cigarettes. In one county in Indiana ACORN turned in 5,000 applications, 2,100 of which were quickly identified as fakes.
ACORN’s defenders protest that they are the victim of a few bad apples. Some of its workers, they maintain, find it easier to crib names from the phone book than to trawl around looking for real voters. And once the forms are filled out, ACORN has to turn them in. Most states have laws requiring as much, so that partisan workers cannot bin any applications out of personal prejudice. In fact, claims ACORN, they make an effort to label the obviously fake ballots as such.
But Republicans are crying foul. They say that ACORN is a shady group working to steal the presidential election on behalf of Barack Obama. The plot thickens: Mr Obama led training sessions for the group back in his Chicago community-organiser days, and his campaign has had some dealings with it.
Still, voting fraud on an election-changing scale seems unlikely, and unnecessary too, given the huge margins that Mr Obama is racking up in many states. To pull it off in the way ACORN is being accused of, a schemer would have to get many thousands of fake registrations past the officials. Then the actual ballots would have to be cast, which would require thousands of impersonators actually to turn up and vote. (Fraudulent absentee ballots, which could be mailed in, are a different proposition, and are subject to their own checks.) The evidence tends to suggest that ACORN has some bad management flaws, not that it is some kind of massive and mildly incompetent conspiracy.
Of course, the fraudulent registrations are a problem. They gum up the process and open the door to legal complaints. In Ohio, Democrats and Republicans are going at it in court over the best way to flag up irregularities. Everyone wants to avoid having a swing state settled by judges.
Originally posted by generalissimoAcorn's biggest trick is subverting the election process on the public's dime!
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12432392
INTEREST in the upcoming election is running high, and officials around the country have reported big surges in voter registration. But some of the new applicants do not pass muster. In Orlando, home to the Magic Kingdom of Disney, Mickey Mouse tried to register. In India ...[text shortened]... t way to flag up irregularities. Everyone wants to avoid having a swing state settled by judges.
From the Wall Street Journal:
According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.
All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122394051071230749.html