Voting problems already

ACORN Workers Indicted For Alleged Voter Fraud

Four people have been indicted on charges of voter fraud in Kansas City, officials said Wednesday.

Investigators said questionable registration forms for new voters were collected by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a group that works to improve minority and low-income communities.

The four indicted -- Kwaim A. Stenson, Dale D. Franklin, Stephanie L. Davis and Brian Gardner -- were employed by ACORN as registration recruiters. They were each charged with two counts.

Federal indictments allege the four turned in false voter registration applications. Prosecutors said the indictments are part of a national investigation.

ACORN and Project Vote recruit and assign workers to low-income and minority neighborhoods to register people to vote.

The Kansas City Election Board told KMBC they found suspicious forms, such as seven applications from one person and an application for a dead man.

"There is some motive behind it -- this is not accidental," said Ray James with the Kansas City Election Board.

Election officials said some of the application cards had false addresses, signatures and phone numbers.

ACORN officials in Kansas City said they turned in the four people who were indicted.

"We're very happy that they were indicted," said Claudie Harris with ACORN.

Harris said ACORN workers are paid by the hour and not by the number of voter registration cards they turn in. "When you fraudulently defraud this, that gives us a bad name and what we're trying to do a bad name," Harris said.

ACORN officials said the four indicted have been fired.

Harris said ACORN workers check every voter registration card before sending it to the Election Board.

Last month, ACORN claimed to have processed more than 35,000 voter registration applications in Kansas City since the summer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/kmbc/20061102/lo_kmbc/10214492

Don't know much about the group, other than they are behind initiatives indexing minimum wage to inflation.

Hardly sounds radical or hate mongering to me.

The Acorn Indictments
A union-backed outfit faces charges of election fraud.

Friday, November 3, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

So, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board. But hey, who needs voter ID laws?

We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement that "This national investigation is very much ongoing."

Let's hope so. Acorn officials bill themselves as nonpartisan community organizers merely interested in giving a voice to minorities and the poor. In reality, Acorn is a union-backed, multimillion-dollar outfit that uses intimidation and other tactics to push for higher minimum wage mandates and to trash Wal-Mart and other non-union companies.

Operating in at least 38 states (as well as Canada and Mexico), Acorn pushes a highly partisan agenda, and its organizers are best understood as shock troops for the AFL-CIO and even the Democratic Party. As part of the Fannie Mae reform bill, House Democrats pushed an "affordable housing trust fund" designed to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits to subsidize Acorn, among other groups. A version of this trust fund actually passed the Republican House and will surely be on the agenda again next year.Acorn and its affiliates have pulled some real stunts in recent years. In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn's practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.

"You have to wonder what's the point of that, if not to overwhelm the system and get phony registrations on the voter rolls," says Thor Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights, who also testified at the hearing. "These were Democratic officials saying that they felt their election system in Ohio was under assault by these kinds of efforts to game the system."

Given this history, it's not surprising that Acorn is so hostile to voter identification laws and other efforts to ensure fairness and accuracy at the polls. In Missouri last month, the state Supreme Court held that a photo ID requirement to vote was overly burdensome and a violation of the state constitution. Acorn was behind the original suit challenging the statute, and it has brought similar challenges in several other states, including Ohio.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that blacks today are almost twice as likely as they were in 2004 to say they have little or no confidence in the voting system. Such a finding would seem like a powerful argument for voter ID laws, which consistently poll well among people of all races and incomes and would increase confidence in the voting process. Of course, voter ID laws would also cut down on fraud, which, judging from the latest indictments, would put a real crimp in Acorn's style.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009189

Hey Sierra - if ever there was a problem that was intrinsically anti-American and not just anti-left or anti-right, this is it.

Don't you think this is an issue for all Americans who want fair elections, and something that we could stand to talk about in other than partisan terms?

snood wrote:

Hey Sierra - if ever there was a problem that was intrinsically anti-American and not just anti-left or anti-right, this is it.

Don't you think this is an issue for all Americans who want fair elections, and something that we could stand to talk about in other than partisan terms?

Hey, Snood - why is it that liberals think that simply asking voters to show a photo ID is some sort of poll tax, even when the state would provide free photo IDs to those who couldn't afford one?

snood wrote:

Hey Sierra - if ever there was a problem that was intrinsically anti-American and not just anti-left or anti-right, this is it.

Don't you think this is an issue for all Americans who want fair elections, and something that we could stand to talk about in other than partisan terms?

Hey, Snood - why is it that liberals think that simply asking voters to show a photo ID is some sort of poll tax, even when the state would provide free photo IDs to those who couldn't afford one?

SierraSong wrote:

snood wrote:

Hey Sierra - if ever there was a problem that was intrinsically anti-American and not just anti-left or anti-right, this is it.

Don't you think this is an issue for all Americans who want fair elections, and something that we could stand to talk about in other than partisan terms?

Hey, Snood - why is it that liberals think that simply asking voters to show a photo ID is some sort of poll tax, even when the state would provide free photo IDs to those who couldn't afford one?

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