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Why ACORN Blatantly Defrauds The System

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  October 14th, 2008 at 09:40 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

What’s ACORN’s angle in all of this? You’ve got to have asked yourself the question. Why blatantly overwhelm the system. They had to know they’d get caught.

Step back for a minute. Yes, the immediate goal is to get Barack Obama elected President. But beyond that, what is the goal?

If you remember my original post on the New Party, I noted that

By 1996, the New Party had solidified its ties with ACORN, unions, and the left so much so that even the New York Times referred to it as “leftist.” Manning Marable, writing in the left-wing New York Beacon, on October 23, 1996, wrote that “there are four key components in this strategy for progressive political change.” Among those components were civil disobedience and “support for independent movements like the New Party which are running candidates in local races. More importantly an innovative approach to electoralism is represented by ACORN’s ‘living wage’ referenda campaigns.”

One of the New Party’s shared goals with ACORN is on the New Party’s website. It is “Full public financing of elections, universal voter registration, proportional representation, free party competition.”

The Sundries Shack does a good job tying all of this together:

The entire reason ACORN was founded was to overload our governmental systems so that the progressives could claim them broken and replace them with something of their own devising.

By overwhelming and disrupting the system, ACORN and the left can claim the system is in need of fixing. What will the cures be? Universal voter registration and public financing of elections for starters.

They broke it and they want to fix it.

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  • sergee3

    What is taking so long for the McCain camp to rail on the serious connections between Obama and ACORN?

    We are inundated, rightfully so, with all of the malfeasance of ACORN, but we see only sparing statements regarding Obama?s contributions, statements, and public appearances supporting the group. Yes, I can find tons of references to this stuff here on RS, but Earth-To-McCain-Camp: Let?s get moving with this, shall we?

  • NightTwister

    …another lie from the left.

    Remind me again which candidate in this election committed to using public financing and stuck by that commitment?

  • mdc

    In your October surprise post, you said the pieces will tie together then there will be a twist to the story.
    And that the MSM will not be able to ignore this.

    I see the things coming together, but I am missing the MSM covering it.
    Other then the ACORN part which is being reported somewhat.

    I take it that there is something more to come?

  • Soulsamurai

    http://townhall.com/columnists/AmandaCarpenter/2008/10/13/obamadistortsacorn_ties

    http://townhall.com/Columnists/FrankPastore/2008/10/14/obama,acorn,andcontemptforelectionlaw

    http://townhall.com/Columnists/AmandaCarpenter/2008/10/13/acornsrapsheet

  • MichaelBDR

    A Union leadership backed bill commonly called ‘card check’ is a precursor of coming elections. In it, a Union can be forced on a company if a majority of the workers are union members, without a secret vote. A union could unionize a company by having union members apply for a job to fill the ranks with a majority of union members, as well as harass non union members to sign a unions card. When enough are union members, they take over the company.

    In the future.

    A Democrat leadership backed bill called ‘party check’ is passed. In it a parties chosen leader can be forced on a country, state, city if a majority of the registered voters belong to that party, without a secret vote. A party could gain control of a government by having party members move to that area, as well as harass non registered voters to register (up to 72 times each). When enough are registered Democrat, they take over the government.

  • youthgrunt

    This is the 4th rule of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”

    RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

  • cmw

    “They broke it and they want to fix it.”

    Kind of like ACORN intimidating banks into giving loans to poor and minorities whose credit was not otherwise worthy of such a loan. And extorting payments from these same banks, by threatening to race the all-too-familiar race card when the bank wanted to expand.

    Then, when the “system” explodes, as it has, you force the government to start nationalizing banks and GSEs and insurance companies, and then slip into the bailout bill a section to funnel more money to ACORN (luckily, removed).

    Next step: continue playing the race card (not to mention the cornerstone of ACORN, election fraud) to get your candidate elected president. Once in, “reform” the banking rules and frankly, everything else, to “fix” what was broken … as it turns out, broken by ACORN in the first place.

    So now that we know the game and the goal, can we please start fighting back? Or will be refuse to adapt to the new rules of political engagement, and suffer the consequences? This is house-to-house urban warfare, and we showed up with only the big bombs, and we’re afraid to use them for fear of killing innocents. We need to either use what we have or change our strategy (or is it tactics?).

  • Rod_Patrick

    A case in point is the Working Families Party, which is a major proponent of fusion strategy.

    Relatedly, Harrington has selected Democratic Party as the major party to host his communist third parties.

    Obama is the realization of all these efforts.

  • Roark
  • Moe_Lane

    NT

  • Moe_Lane

    Loved the MySpace page.

    “Lucinda is voting for Barack Obama and thinks you should, too.”

    We ban people who lie about who they are on sight.

  • aaronbg

    It’s all about moral equivalence….even when there is no real comparison. Just float it out there as an accusation and see if it sticks.

    SHAMELESS!!!

  • Cheetah772

    That’s what I am wondering about.

    More than anything else, I strongly believe that the electoral college is the reason America is usually more conservative than the rest of world. Therefore, I wouldn’t be surprised if ACORN wants to discard the current electoral college in favor of going with most popular votes nationally.

    I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Obama advocating such ideas if he wins the race. He’ll say it will create more equality but in reality, it will reduce the importance of rural voters and increase the political power of urban centers. It’s a recipe for disasters politically for Republicans and conservatives alike.

    The sad fact is, nothing surprises me anymore.

  • bart

    “They broke it and they want to fix it.” Its the Cloward-Piven strategy. Folks, its no coincidence. A year ago Durbin and Obama sponsored legislation to shield ACORN from Truth In Lending statutes, regarding mortgages. Now how did they know a year ago about the current crisis? Read about the Cloward-Piven strategy and keep in mind Schumer’s release of the letter Re: IndyMac, causing the first run on a bank. You’ll have an epiphany: “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.” (9/29/2008 @ American Thinker)

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barackobamaandthestrategy.html

  • gamecock

    they want people to lsoe faith in our voting process. They would rather elections be decided by judges.

  • BlueLandRed

    What is taking so long for the McCain camp to rail on the serious connections between Obama and ACORN?

    Outside of the fact that the MSM is now mostly in the bag for Obama, there does seem to be more smoke than fire here. First, in most states, “mistakes” on registration forms rarely rise to be significant criminal acts… unlike actual vote fraud where someone tries to cast (successfully or not) an illegal vote.

    And rightly or wrongly, calling them “mistakes” or blaming “a few bad” people will certainly be the excuse that ACORN and Obama use to attempt to excuse this issue.

    Second, the level of “mistakes” just doesn’t seem that high. Maybe I’m not seeing all of the shenanigans here, but honestly, I’m not seeing anything where the actual fraud levels will exceed the margin of error inherent in any vote.

    And finally, this just isn’t a story that I think is going to grab the attention of the apathetic middle… you know, the people that actually end up deciding which candidate gets elected. So I can see McCain’s team pushing this connection a little bit, but I think it would be a waste of resources and time to invest heavily here given the current state of the race. But that’s just my 2 cents.

  • bart

    Sorry, that is 9/28/2008 @ American Thinker.com “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.” See also, outstanding related articles: “Sowing ACORNs to reap the biggest oak tree in Washington, DC” 10/7/08; and “The Crime of the Century: The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,” 10/8/08 @ Americanthinker.com

  • Lammo

    They can’t possibly have kept track of all of the fraudulent registrations in order to have people show up and try to vote claiming to be “Mickey Mouse” or whoever. To be sure, there will be some of that but I think the whole thing is too massive, and too obvious, to get away with more than a relative few actual fraudulent votes. But, put in the light of breaking the system so they can fix it, I can see clearly what they are trying to do. Thanks!

  • slckid

    the more subtle results of the massive new voter registrations turned in (fraudulently or not) by the likes of ACORN? The more registered Democrats there are, the more polling groups like Rassmussen are able to weight their samples. When they release their poll numbers with a higher sampling of D’s (generally +6 to +16 percent more) they are consistently showing Obama with a sizable lead. Polls, whether we like it or not, shape the views of a large number of uninformed and uninterested potential voters. This is one way that ACORN can help to shape the election in addition to their GOTV campaign.

  • j1mcamp

    I just want to make a couple of notes on the ACORN situation as I understand it.
    - What individuals have alleged is voter registration fraud – not vote fraud. If “Mickey Mouse” or “Michael Jordan” were to be registered, they still would not be allowed to vote at the polls.
    - ACORN has replied that they were required by law to submit all registration documents, regardless of whether they thought them to be accurate or not, and they flagged ones they throught to be fraudulent.
    - Canvassers were not paid based on the number of registrations – all were paid by the hour.
    - People who suggest that Democrats are registering tons of voters this year can’t blame all of the voter registrations on ACORN. Obama has been doing a great job of getting people registered by enlisting lots of regular people as grass roots volunteers.
    - There have been a number of stories of republican efforts to purge registered voters from the voter rolls in key states.

    Regarding the “broken-ness” of the system. We already know it is broken. If you look up “blackbox voting” or the “Open Voting Consortium,” you can get more information about this. The electronic vote counting systems are not perfect, and some of the systems have difficulty counting the same ballots in the same ways repeatedly. This is not acceptable, regardless of your party affiliation.

    P.S. Yes, I just joined red-state today. :)

  • youthgrunt

    We are beginning to see the actual vote fraud:

    http://www.nypost.com/seven/10142008/news/politics/bogusvoterbootedamidprobeofacorn_133540.htm

    The problem is that with the blizzard of registrations going on it will 1) be difficult to find the actual vote fraud and 2) keep the registration workers from fulfilling their duties of scrubbing the registrations (see Florida with 30,000 convicted felons still on the voting rolls).

  • aaronbg

    And as far as the polls go, that would actually diminish Obama’s lead and maybe even put McCain in much better position for Nov 4th.
    1.

  • j1mcamp

    Ok, that’s not good. Still, you can see from some of the comments below, that a bipartisan board is saying it isn’t as huge of a deal as people are making it out to be, and that (I think this is really important) ACORN is totally cooperating with the investigation – including encouraging prosecution of anyone found doing anything wrong.

    From the article:

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

    And Platten (ed: an election board official) 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, here’s a story, just out today, about DIEBOLD voting machine inaccuracies. There’s a link to the actual study from within the summary. I think problems like this do indicate a broken election system, and something that any future president should fix.

  • terilyn

    ….is very simple. There is a direct connection between BO and ACORN. His current campaign paid one of their affiliates to register voters.

  • Common_Cents

    Any CPA/Tax attorneys?

    ACORN hides behind independent contractor status. Do the street teams actually qualify to be independent contractors under IRS rules?

    No office staff are involved in any fraud investigation? They are employees.

    I’d think if ACORN provided training for ind contractors that leads to false registrations they’d be able to negate Ind contractor basis and hold them liable as employer/employee status.

  • j1mcamp

    A community organization can register people to vote, but it does not and cannot vote for them.

    Every person who meets the legal requirements to vote should be able to vote, and there is nothing wrong with paying an organization to register people to vote.

    I would not be upset at all if John McCain’s campaign had paid a community organization to register these same people, or a different group of people, to vote.

  • PaRep

    73 times??

  • nivlem

    They spent many times in court due to the
    poll workers at the end of the evening
    entering votes for Democrats for all those registered who did not vote.

    The ONLY reason ACORN would make all this
    effort to pay and entice people to register and enter false names is because
    they know they can throw an election. They know they will not be caught until
    after the election.

    We cannot be so naive to think this is
    innocent. It is not.

  • Jack_Savage

    An organization dedicated to breaking the electoral system as we know it is not worthy of spending a minute more out of jail.

    You make it sound so sweet and innocent, and you are so dead wrong.

  • j1mcamp

    I agree that anything like that is bad & should not happen.

    I would still argue that Obama has motivated people to register to vote on their own, and motivated grass-roots efforts outside of ACORN to get people to sign up to vote in a way that we have not seen before. So to blame a huge Democratic turnout on ACORN’s efforts alone wouldn’t be accurate.

  • j1mcamp

    How is registering people to vote “breaking a system,” and how is what I’ve said wrong?

  • j1mcamp

    You are suggesting that ACORN paid and enticed people to register. I don’t think that’s accurate. Were all ACORN registrees paid? How many were paid or enticed? Who did it? How widespread is the problem, and how could any registration like this affect actual votes?

    And your PA polling story… that is crappy. I would hope people don’t do that, and anyone who did get caught doing that should be punished.

    I want the ACORN stuff to be investigated, but I also want the voter suppression from the republicans to be investigated and stopped. Each person should be able to vote, but only once.

  • PaRep

    .

  • Martin_A_Knight

    This is a criminal enterprise. Who happened to get $800000 from the Obama campaign to “deliver.”

    2 + 2 = 4 no matter how you slice it.

    PS: Democrats have been alleging voter suppression on the part of Republicans for 3 straight decades without ever producing one person who was prevented from voting by Republicans.

  • Moe_Lane

    But maybe you can convince the Directors otherwise.

  • Mike_Dugas

    They are registering individuals as new voters at multiple stations under numerous names and having them vote multiple times thus manipulating the tallies and the election.
    Now you already know all of this and obviously you have no problem with the cheating because you are a Democrat you have a fine history of cheating.
    Yes occasionally you hear the odd story
    about some attempt by a Republican to cheat but it’s always isolated and never to the scale and scope of the Democrats voter fraud. Republicans have this whole thing about the sanctity of the vote and one vote per person. How can the left be expected to vote honestly when they don’t even really believe in the Constitution.

  • PaRep

    .

  • Putter

    “Blam”. I, for one, like to hear the elongated report of a supersonic projectile.

  • nivlem

    six have been arrested in Ohio, and
    are testifying against ACORN. The
    first stated he was given money and
    a cigarette. This was only the first.
    There have been testimony after testimony
    over the years stating similar enticements.

    What a waste of time. You don’t want to
    know what they are doing, and you won’t
    believe it even if you see if…..

    What a waste..

  • aclendenen

    Please forgive my ignorance but what is the drawback with universal voter registration?

    I agree that there is something more to ACORN’s mass voter registration than just getting more donations so I would like to know what it is about Universal Voter Registration that is negative.

    Regards.

  • Tim_Schieferecke

    Really, if that has to be explained to you, or ACORN’S fraud needs to be explained to you, you’re beyond hope.

  • Lammo

    how you define “universal”. Does it mean everyone living and breathing over a certain age, regardless of whether they are citizens, convicted felons or poor unfortunate souls in a coma? There’s absolutely no reason to redefine voter registration to make it “universal” as it is ridiculously easy to register. It can be done at any post office, county election office, Department of Motor Vehicles office, in some places it can even be done on-line! Sounds pretty universal to me. The only thing we ask is that you register once where you actually live and vote once, period. Unfortunately that’s just too much to expect from certain people who can’t manage to win elections on the strength of their ideas and positions on the issues.

  • aclendenen

    Thanks for the great insight there Tim. Although I didn’t ask for or need any explanation regarding ACORN’s fraud.
    I guess I could make the same statement to you about not being able to read my question.

  • aclendenen

    Lammo, assuming that one gets registered as part of their drivers license, state ID, selective service registration, and also assuming that there is some checks to ensure they only get registered once I don’t see what is wrong with this idea. You do make some good points about people that pass away, slip into a comma, get convicted of a felony, so on, but that problem exists today as well. Here in AZ we don’t have to get a new license for decades, but in CA I think it is 10 years or less so there could be ‘heart beats’ built into the system, such as if you don’t show up for jury duty or your license expires.

    I still feel that there must be something more to this though. Some big drawback that I am not thinking of.

    Thanks for your comments.

    Regards.

  • Lammo

    Here in WA our driving licenses are good for 4 years but you can renew them online – leads to a lot of people who don’t look like their picure anymore! I think I understand your sense of universal as being widely available (mutiple locations and points of entry) and easily accomplished and apologize for any snark that crept in. I think we have that, at least here in WA. The drawback as I see it is in places where it’s too easy – no time limit before election day to register, ability to register and vote the same day, no requirement to provide identification in order to cast your ballot. In my county we vote completely by mail (with a few exceptions for the disabled (can I say that?)). In the primary, they questioned my wife’s ballot because the signature on her ballot did not match her registration (she has an “everyday” scribble and a “formal” signature). She had to update her registration with two witnesses to verify that she was in fact herself. A bit of a pain but a system that worked. That type of verification can’t be done in a place where you can register and vote on the same day.