ACORN Signs Up The Dallas Cowboys In Fraud Sting

The group know as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is getting a lot of attention due to irregularities in their voter registration practices. Their Las Vegas office was raided after complaints of voter fraud. Some reports even say they have registered the whole starting line up of the Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada. The group has been submitting registrations through a voter sign-up drive known as Project Vote. Bob Walsh, spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state’s office said, “some of them used nonexistent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were duplicates of previously filed applications.” ACORN has responded by saying, “Today’s raid by the secretary of state’s office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls.” This is not the only instance or the first time ACORN’s voter registration drives have been in question. They are currently under investigation in several states, and in 2006 they committed what Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed called the “worse case of election fraud” in the state’s history. In that case they submitted over 1,800 new voter registration forms, and only 6 prove to be real. Part of the problem is they recruit recruiters off the street and pay them per person they register. They are supposed to be a non-partisan organization, but they focus their attention on groups that are traditionally democratic like blacks, young, Latino and low income earners. They call these groups “historically underrepresented in elections.” Their current drive is concentrating their efforts in battleground states Barack Obama needs to win. Project Vote ran voter registration operations in 21 states; included are the battlegrounds Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
John McCain’s camp has responded to this situation by saying, “ACORN is one of the largest radical organizations in America that represents another questionable association of Barack Obama’s. Obama’s campaign has been endorsed by ACORN’s political action committee and their sister corporation received nearly $1 million from Obama’s campaign which they originally misrepresented on their FEC report. ACORN masquerades their efforts as good yet the endless examples of voter fraud and wrongdoing makes clear that their true mission is to poison the political process. ACORN’s efforts are reminiscent of the sleazy Chicago politics that Barack Obama embraces.” From ACORN’s own press release it states “ACORN’s non-partisan voter registration program is about empowering local low- and moderate-income people by bringing them into the democratic process.” They go on to state, “in 2007-2008 ACORN has already helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. The majority of ACORN registrants are low-income, about 75% are African-American, 25% are Latino and 50% are under 30 years old.” I guess poor white people and senior citizens just don’t count when it comes to ACORN.
Alan Cosgrove