I think of the RedState community as my extended family, and I’m grateful to all of you for reading my past missives on markets and finance. I’ve been all but absent from the front page for months now, and I owe you an explanation.

First, my businesses have been performing very well this year, and being a CEO is time-consuming. Second, and more interesting to most of you, is that I’ve bitten the poisoned apple of electoral politics.

My wife, Paula Hostetter, was engaged as the campaign manager to Angelo Maragos, a young businessman who embarked on the seemingly quixotic task of running as a Republican for New York City Council. I got sucked in because a political campaign needs management-type people who can build a strong team quickly, and there I was.

I’m tremendously proud of Paula, who has run a tough, disciplined campaign against the longest possible odds (more on that in a moment). We definitely broke through the clutter to reach our voters. We ran a multi-dimensional campaign that was long on organization and strategy. I can tell you that the last few years of hanging around the assorted political junkies and professionals that comprise RedState’s contributor roster, gave us insights that paid off big-time.

I’d like to say that tomorrow the voters of western Queens will decide whether we made the sale. That’s where the picture gets complicated.

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Matthew Vadum had precisely the same reaction that I did when I read the Ben Smith Politico article that published ACORN founder Wade Rathke’s denial that White House Director Political Director Patrick Gaspard was affiliated with his group: Umm.  No.  It’s not Ben’s fault - this is all deliberately designed to be confusing - but there are a clear set of links.  It goes like this:

First, ACORN has long been known to have The Working Families Party as one of its front organizations.  As Discover the Networks notes:

Currently composed of some 30,000 members, the Working Families Party (WFP) is a front group for ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). WFP functions as a political party in New York State and Connecticut, promoting ACORN-friendly candidates. Unlike conventional political parties, WFP charges its members dues — about $60 per year — a policy characteristic of ACORN and its affiliates.

According to the party’s website, WFP is a coalition founded jointly by ACORN, the Communications Workers of America, and the United Automobile Workers. However, ACORN clearly dominates the coalition. New York ACORN leader Steven Kest was the moving force in forming the party, and WFP headquarters are located at the same address as ACORN’s national office, at 88 Third Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

Second, as Matthew Vedum reported, the link between Gaspard and the WFP is clear: he himself identified with the political party.

Third, as I mentioned earlier today, Gaspard is continuing to assist the WFP in local elections.

The Working Families Party and its secretive private company are apparently not alone in helping out Bill de Blasio’s campaign behind the scenes.

De Blasio, who is a candidate in the four-way Democratic primary for public advocate, has also has been getting a helping hand from Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director, and from the deputy director of the New York State Democratic Committee.

So. ACORN = WFP = Patrick Gaspard. Wade Rathke’s sudden performance to the contrary.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Every once in a while Democrats and the media assert that there’s never any election fraud or that it rarely results in cast votes. This is false. My favorite example is the 2003 Democratic Mayoral primary in which 32 people were convicted of voter fraud, and the election was subsequently thrown out by the court.

It turns out that the Troy, NY municipal elections are highly contested this year. And when elections are close, and especially in primaries, the stakes get high. And the fraud starts. In this case, the fraud was over the Working Families line. And the ballots themselves explicitly link the fraud to Democratic Party officials and Working Family Party officials to that fraud. From the Albany Times Union:

Documents at the county Board of Elections show the fraudulent ballots were handled by or prepared on behalf of various elected officials and leaders and operatives for the Democratic and Working Families parties. A Troy housing authority employee, Anthony Defiglio, who sources said oversees vacant properties for the Troy Housing Authority, also handled many of the fraudulent ballots, according to public records and interviews with voters who said they were duped.

Victor Gonzalez, a resident of Griswold Heights, told the Times Union he was visited several weeks ago by Defiglio and another man who asked him to sign an absentee ballot application. Gonzalez is registered on the WFP line. But Gonzalez, like many other people interviewed, never saw, signed or submitted the absentee ballot later filed at the Board of Elections under his name.

Also, someone else wrote on the Gonzalez’s ballot application that he couldn’t vote in person because of a work conflict.

”I’ve been out of work for about six to eight months. I’ve been laid off and looking for work,” he said.

Now Erick has been on a tear about Bertha Lewis, the CEO of ACORN, the former head of NY ACORN, and the Co-chair of the New York Working Families Party. ACORN has regularly been accused of fraud and there seem to be significant convictions every year, but they just through the staff under the bus. In this case, it seems it goes up into WFP leadership. How do we know? Read on for the answer.

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We have broken down in detail how ACORN has its own political party called the Working Families Party in New York. When a candidate appears as a Working Families Party candidate in New York, it is a signal that this is the candidate ACORN is putting up.

In New York’s 23rd Congressional District, the Republican Party rushed to nominate Dede Scozzafava as the replacement for Congressman McHugh, now in the Obama administration. It turns out that Scozzafava is also an ACORN backed candidate having received the Working Families Party endorsement on numerous occasions.

The great news in this district is that the Conservative Party candidate, Mr. Hoffman, is within striking distance of beating Scozzafava. We need to make sure Scozzafava is destroyed at the polls. It would be bad news to have an ACORN backed candidate infiltrating the GOP in Congress.

You can read the first part of our examination of ACORN contacts leaked to RedState by clicking here.

Above is a word cloud of the associations in the Bertha Lewis contacts list we received. Some are legitimate business dealings. Forest City Ratner, for example, is both bailing out ACORN and relying on its support for its construction projects. But others are more intriguing.

The larger the name, the greater the frequency of the name appearing in the contacts list. For many years it has been speculated that SEIU and ACORN share a common foundation. This seems to suggest as much. In fact, in at least one appearance on the contacts list, an SEIU official has an ACORN email address.

But were this picture a tree, the trunk would be the Working Families Party. Roger Stone has suggested the Working Families Party is ACORN. Bertha Lewis’s contacts list suggests as much.

Lewis is both the head of ACORN and also the Co-Chair of the Working Families Party. As you can imagine, ACORN would have us believe that those are separate roles. However, information suggests otherwise and we also know that ACORN has a habit of creating political parties for its own ends.

To understand how the Working Families Party is part of ACORN, we need to understand the concept of “fusionism.”

I’ve written about this concept before and it is essential to ACORN’s political strategy.

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