More fraud from ACORN

Like a TV show in endless repeats, we come across another story of ACORN submitting phony voter registration forms, this time in Michigan.

The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN's Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.

"There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State's Office. "And it appears to be widespread."

Chesney said her office has had discussions with ACORN officials after local clerks reported the questionable applications to the state. Chesney said some of the applications are duplicates and some appear to be names that have been made up. The Secretary of State's Office has turned over several of the applications to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

The U.S. Attorney's Office on Friday declined to confirm whether an investigation was taking place.

In recent years, ACORN's voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Missouri and Washington, with some employees convicted of voter fraud.

ACORN says that they're "looking into the problem." That should be easy since they seem to run into this same fraud everywhere they go. Earlier, we saw the same story in Ohio. And they were convicted of the biggest case of voter fraud ever in Washington state. This is what happens when you pay a bunch of part-time people per application that they submit. Fraud then is built into the system because some of these guys are going to cheat just to earn some more easy money. And ACORN doesn't seem to even operate the minimal controls to look over the applications they're submitting to see if they're submitting the same guy's name over and over. Then ACORN goes whining about states like Indiana that want to implement stricter voter identification procedures as when they filed an amicus brief against Indiana's case earlier this year.

And it's no coincidence that ACORN is closely linked to Barack Obama who, as Jennifer Rubin has written, when he was head of the Wods Foundation shoveled quite a bit of money their way.

During Obama’s time on the Woods Funds ACORN received grants of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002), and $40,000 (2002) from the Woods Fund. (Obama in the early 1990’s helped train ACORN organizers and later served as counsel in 1995 for ACORN in a “motor voter” registration lawsuit.) And ACORN certainly appreciated whatever assistance Obama afforded the radical organization over the years.

Founder Toni Foulkes enthusiastically backed Obama’s U.S. Senate run in 2004, declaring: “ACORN is active in experimenting with methods of increasing voter participation in our low and moderate income communities to virtually every election. But in some elections we get to have our cake and eat it too: work on nonpartisan voter registration and GOTV [get out the vote], which also turns out to benefit the candidate we hold dear [Obama].”

Read the rest of Rubin's article for more background on how Obama used his position on the Woods Foundation to shovel money to leftist organizations that then turned around to help further his political career. He had quite a cycle going. And now it continues with ACORN trying to sign up more voters to support Obama even if they have to commit fraud to do it.