No matter who wins tonight, all of this needs a full audit and the full attention of the public. It is ridiculous and shameful that our election processes should be so fraught with ineptitude and/or corruption. America can do better.
fraud
ARLINGTON, VA – Today at 2:00 p.m. EDT, the McCain-Palin presidential campaign will hold a press conference call with Senior Advisors Brian Jones, Ed O’Callaghan and Deputy Campaign Manager Christian Ferry to discuss Election Day voting irregularities.
Since I couldn’t make this call, I’m just waiting to hear what was said from my peeps over at Voter Fraud Squad (or anyone else who dialed in).
If you think fraudulent voter registration cards can’t turn into votes and that all the “vote fraud” stories are just Hype, you should read this excellent new piece by WSJ columnist John Fund writing for Politico. As usual, John’s fact checking and research is stellar. Here are some excerpts from his article:
ACORN’s second line of defense has been that fraudulent registrations can’t turn into fraudulent votes, as if the felony of polluting voter lists was somehow not all that serious. But that defense goes only a short distance. “How would you know if people using fake names had cast votes in states without strict ID laws?” says GOP Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, who this year won a major Supreme Court case upholding his state’s photo identification law. “It’s almost impossible to detect and once the fraudulent voter leaves the precinct or casts an absentee ballot, that vote is thrown in with other secret ballots there’s no way to trace it.”
AND
Anita MonCrief, an ACORN whistle-blower who worked for both it and its Project Vote registration affiliate from 2005 until early this year, agrees. “It’s ludicrous to say that fake registrations can’t become fraudulent votes,” she told me. “I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots.”
AND
There are already documented examples of fraudulent registrations being converted into fraudulent votes in Ohio, where ACORN and other groups were active. Darrell Nash, an ACORN registration worker, submitted an illegal form for himself and then cast a paper ballot during the state’s “early voting” period.
Franklin County prosecutor Ron O’Brien also cracked down in the case of 13 out-of-state registrants who came to Ohio to register voters in Columbus for the group Vote From Home. The group all lived out of the same rented 1,175-square-foot house in Ohio, registered to vote and then most of them either cast early voting ballots or submitted applications for absentee ballots before leaving the state. They have agreed to have all of their ballots canceled in exchange for the prosecutor’s decision not to file charges.
AND
Perhaps the clearest look at how fraudulent registrations can be converted into votes comes from Wisconsin. Earlier this year, the Milwaukee Police Department’s Special Investigation Unit released a stunning 67-page report detailing an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome” of the 2004 presidential election.
It noted many documented cases of staffers for a presidential campaign and an allied 527 group who illegally voted. Those involved in the scheme “represent multiple levels of both the organizations, from upper management to the street level canvassers.” The task force report found many ineligible voters had cast ballots, ineligible felons not only had voted but also worked at the polls, transient college students had cast illegal votes along with day-trippers from nearby Chicago, and homeless voters may well have voted more than once.
Read the whole thing!
I just love Mark Steyn. Here he is on a reference to Charlie Gibson’s query re: Obama’s questionable online donations:
Re: Charlie Gibson Hits Obama On His Donors [Mark Steyn]
Oh, please, Greg. That’s not a “hit”, that’s a Swedish massage by Princess Fluffy Bunny. That’s Charlie Gibson appearing to cover himself while letting Obama get away with mush. A (Palin-style?) hit would have taken the conversation on a quite different tack:
OBAMA: What I would simply point to is that the way we have raised this money has been by expanding the pool of small donors in this country in an unprecedented way.
INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION: What’s unprecedented is that, unlike John McCain, your website disabled the standard credit-card security system used by almost all reputable online retailers. Why did you do that? And, given that of the record $150 million you raised in September two-thirds was raised under this systemically corrupted Internet operation, isn’t it likely that a significant proportion of your half-hour infomercial was paid for by fraudulent donors? And, as to “expanding the pool of small donors in this country”, what about the way you’ve expanded the pool of donors in other countries who’ve been able to make illegal contributions to your campaign because you switched off the AVS security checks?
OBAMA: I mean, you’re looking the people who are giving $5, 10, 25. Ordinary folks who have gotten impassioned about this campaign in a way that is unprecedented. And that, really, is…
INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION: Also a lot of extraordinary folks have gotten impassioned about your campaign. You’ve received contributions from, among others, a Mr Saddam Hussein, Mr A Hitler and Mr K Marx? How do you propose to return those contributions given that all three “donors” are deceased?
OBAMA: Look, you know, 3.1 million donors would be a pretty hard thing for us to be able to process…
INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION: Why? I mean, you’ve had no problem “processing” the money, have you? And, if you hadn’t monkeyed with the standard online retail data system, all you have to do is press a button and 3.1 million names and addresses pop right up. Ask Amazon. So why did you switch it off? And, if you yourself did not make that decision, who did?
The Senator terminates the interview to instruct an aide to have state and local officials look into this guy Gibson’s child-support payments, tax liens, etc. Later, it emerges that Charlie the Anchor is not even a state-licensed interviewer.
This morning I heard someone - I think it may be have been Megyn Kelly on Fox News – talking about people buying prepaid credit or debit cards (which have no name or address associated with them) and using those to donate as much as they wish, since Obama’s campaign turned off the credit card security measures on their website.
Who knows how many millions have been collected illegally and/or improperly? The whole thing stinks, and even though Obama will not agree to release a list of his donors, or turn the online security stop gaps back on, not one mainstream/network media outlet (other than Fox) seems to give a damn.
Don’t miss this story by John Fund in the WSJ.
Former ACORN employee Anita MonCrief says ACORN has long been aware of the issues with bogus registration cards. This morning on Lauara Ingraham she said ACORN considers a 40% validity rate acceptable. So much for the claims that ACORN’s upper management team was/is either unaware of the quality control problems or that problems occur only rarely and locally.
“There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances,” says Nate Toler, who worked until 2006 as the head organizer of an Acorn campaign against Wal-Mart in California. And Ms. MonCrief says it is longstanding practice to blame bogus registrations on lower-level employees who then often face criminal charges, a practice she says Acorn internally calls “throwing folks under the bus.”
I’ve got two new posts up @ Vote Fraud Squad:
Judges to rule on Georgia citizenship case
and
GOP hired hand arrested in Cali on suspicion of voter registration fraud
E!! is a Proud Supporter of the VIP
.
Yesterday the New York Times ran an interesting story on page A17. Excerpts and sum-up (it’s a pretty long piece):
.
Apparently an internal report by an ACORN lawyer admits the possibility that there have been violations of federal law in re: to the relationships among ACORN’s partners and affiliates.
.
The June 18 report, written by attorney Elizabeth Kingsley, lists concerns about the improper use of charitable dollars for political purposes; questionable money transfers among the affiliates; and potential conflicts created by employees working for multiple affiliates. In addition to these problems and all the inquiries into its voter registration efforts, ACORN also faces demands for back taxes by the Internal Revenue Service and various state tax authorities.
Ms. Kingsley’s concerns about the way ACORN partners work together are sure to fire up critics already upset over ACORN’s voter registration efforts which, as it has been pointed out, are largely underwritten by an affiliated charity called ”Project Vote.” The group hires ACORN to do voter registration work, and the two groups claim to have registered 1.3 million voters this year.
The problem is that as a federally tax-exempt charity, Project Vote is subject to prohibitions on partisan political activity…but ACORN, a nonprofit membership corporation under Louisiana law, is not bound by the same restrictions. Ms. Kingsley says that the close ties between Project Vote and ACORN make it difficult to document and show that Project Vote’s money has been used in a strictly nonpartisan manner.
Ms. Kingsley’s report also raised concerns about which organization actually controlled all the strategic decisions. She said that the very same people were deciding which regions to focus on for both ACORN and Project Vote. “As a result, we may not be able to prove that 501(c)3 resources are not being directed to specific regions based on impermissible partisan considerations,” Ms. Kingsley said.
Kingsley also took issue with the governance of ACORN affiliates including Project Vote. “Board meetings are not held, or if they are, minutes are not kept, or if minutes are kept, they never make it into the files,” she wrote. Project Vote has had only one independent director and he worked for a short two year stint. Since then the board has consisted of ACORN staff members and two members who pay monthly dues.
But two people listed as board members for 7 and 8 years, respectively, say they were not aware they were on the Project Vote board. One of them, George Hampton, said he had never even heard of Project Vote. And even though Project Vote recently assembled a new board, five of the six new members have longstanding ties to ACORN.
Today I am very glad to have the help of a concerned reader/friend with making a call to the Nevada Secretary of State’s office to get some ACORN answers.
We agreed that the amount and quality of information she/we will get will depend on who answers the phone – and that it would be helpful if other people could also call to see if they get the same or different answers.
If you want to Do Something, call the Sec. of State’s office at 775-684-5705, tell then you are a Nevada citizen, and ask one or more of the following questions:
How did the election board discover the allegedly invalid and/or fraudulent ACORN voter registration cards that are now in question?
Did ACORN bring the questionable voter registration cards to your attention? If not, who did?
What percentage of voter registration cards received from ACORN are invalid so far?
Are you aware of any one ACORN worker whose voter registration cards were at least 90% legitimate?
How much time has been spent so far weeding through every voter registration card? Is this normal? If not, how much more time was spent than usual?
Did this extra time cost your election board extra money? If so, how much more?
ACORN claims that they have to turn all voter registration cards over, even if they know they are not legitimate. Is this true? Is this requirement a state directive, a county directive, or an election board policy?
If you are able to get some answers, please email me ASAP (address on my Contact page).
For ongoing updates about election fraud in all 50 states, go to: http://www.voterfraudsquad.com
For text alerts about election fraud, text “voterfraud” to 69302
For Twitter alerts/threads about election fraud, use hash tag #voterfraud
To join the Voter Fraud Squad Facebook group, go to http://www.facebook.group.php?gid=43934732704
As John Fund of the WSJ is so fond of saying, it is very likely that Election Day is going to turn into election month. Fifteen thousand lawyers have laptops: will travel.
How long it will take all these attorneys to wade through the voter registration fraud problem in 10+ states is anybody’s guess. (There’s a punchline in there somewhere.)
As I wrote last week, ACORN’s Nevada offices were raided by federal law enforcement as part of a voter registration fraud investigation. Among other violations, ACORN-Las Vegas allegedly employed felons in their voter-registration projects not to mention filing gobs of bogus registrations.
Here and in other parts of the country, multiple voter-registration applications have been filed for single voters; voter registrations have been filed for dead, underage, imprisoned, or ineligible voters; identities have been manufactured and/or signatures have been forged and/or addresses have been faked on registration cards; and in some voting districts, registration now stands at more than 100% of the voting-age population.
And what else else would we expect from ACORN and similar groups, really, since they pressure their workers with aggressive registration quotas? Such tactics are bound to breed corruption.
We are already in a mess for this election, but for next time: why not simply pass a federal law that all voters must (1) register at least 90 days prior to the election and (2) show a valid photo ID at their voting location?
This would give election officials the time they need to weed through any fake registrations, and give election monitors the opportunity and means to verify who is standing in front of them.
Just before I was on KNPR with Steve Sebelius this morning, State of Nevada host Dave Berns had Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller on the air discussing yesterday’s raid on the Las Vegas ACORN offices.
After Sec. Miller summed up the situation, Dave mentioned some grousing about the timing of the raid by managers at ACORN. Apparently their offices were stormed just hours before a celebratory potluck dinner was planned in recognition of 80,000 new voter registrations.
The insinuation was that there had been a deliberate intent to interrupt the event. SOS Miller denied this in an eloquent statement that can pretty much be summed up as, “No, we did not try to wreck their little potluck.”
In response to ACORN regional director Matthew Henderson’s claims that the raid was a “politically motivated stunt,” Sec of State Miller reminded listeners that he is a registered Democrat and stated his commitment to “fair and honest elections in Nevada.”
Apparently submitted voter cards included addresses and names that do not exist, duplicates, and names gleaned from the Dallas Cowboys roster. It is also alleged that ACORN hired 59 felons through a work release program.
Miller says new registrations are serial coded on arrival, that he is committed to reviewing and systematically weeding out bogus forms, and that he is “very confident” all the bogus cards can be flagged and invalidated between now and November 4th.
Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin did us the favor of combing through the 20-page search warrant from yesterday’s Las Vegas raid. She flagged the section where ACORN employee Jason Anderson referred to some of their canvassers as “lazy crack-heads”.
Anderson said ACORN sets quotas of 20 registration forms per canvasser per shift and that slackers are put on probation or terminated if they do not produce.
Mary Pat Flaherty @ the Washington Post is reporting a raid of ACORN’s Nevada office as part of an ongoing investigation into alleged voter fraud.
Apparently seven agents from the NV Sec of State and AG offices served a search warrant and removed boxes and computers.
(ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.)
The gist of the complaint against ACORN is that they are trying to bombard election officials with new registrations that are carelessly gathered and might enable unqualified voters to get on the rolls.
So far, proven offenses range from illegible names on registration cards to names being drawn from telephone listings or other public directories.
Here’s ACORN’s Nevada website/contact info if you are curious.
