Systemic corruption of our election process continues. Barack Obama and his old friends at ACORN and Project Vote are leading the way. This radical revolution is taking place in your backyard. And as I've reported before, this voter-fraud racket is on your dime.
On Monday, the two liberal groups announced the wrap-up of a 21-state voter registration drive targeting low-income people and minorities in battleground states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
What's wrong with that? For starters, these two groups are militant partisan outfits purporting to engage in nonpartisan civic activity. And their campaign comes amid an avalanche of fresh voter-fraud allegations involving ACORN in many of those same key states.
On Tuesday, Nevada state officials raided ACORN's Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names.
ACORN, which receives 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers to pursue an aggressive welfare-state agenda, has already helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. The rest of their funding comes from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance.
Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, was founded by left-wing lawyer Sandy Newman to register voters in welfare offices and unemployment lines with the explicit goal of turning back the Reagan revolution.
The two groups are inextricably linked -- and at their nexus is Barack Obama.
In 1992, Newman hired Obama to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The Illinois drive's motto: "It's a Power Thing."
As previously noted in this column ("The ACORN Obama Knows," June 25, 2008), Obama also trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN's PAC endorsed his primary bid with full backing and muscle.
Despite his adamant denials of any association with the group (his Fight the Smears website now claims "Barack Obama never organized with ACORN"), Obama's political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda.
The Obama campaign's "Vote for Change" registration drive, running parallel to ACORN/Project Vote, is an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama's big-government vision. "Our volume," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe bragged of the voter-registration program, "will be enormous."
Quantity over quality. It's the ACORN way.
In addition to the Las Vegas raid, fraud allegations keep piling up:
-- Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected a large portion of the 5,000 registration forms ACORN turned in after conducting registration drives in the area all summer. Some vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from telephone books and forged signatures. According to local reports, "large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style" and "apparently the organization's canvassers broke rules to meet ACORN-set voter registration quotas to get paid." The fake registrants included dead people and underage kids.
On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 voter applications were no good -- tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen.
-- Last month, Milwaukee, Wis., officials discovered at least seven felons employed as voter registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter registration cards. The state GOP accused ACORN of attempting to enroll dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to voter rolls. Fraud has plagued ACORN's Milwaukee chapter since the last election cycle.
-- In Florida, in Orange County alone, ACORN workers turned in multiple copycat forms for six separate voters over the summer. According to the Miami Herald, "One individual had 21 duplicate applications."
Election officials had flagged ACORN's negligent practices several months ago, but it may be too late: In Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, ACORN has signed up 135,000 new voters, nearly 60 percent of them registered as Democrats that constitute a fifth of all new voters in that region.
-- In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people received free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling prospects to the polls. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who told her ACORN "told her who to vote for if she wanted a 'better life,' and told her not to worry about jury duty (one of the reasons this homeless woman didn't want to register) because the government probably wouldn't be able to track her down. She was registering with a temporary address."
Holliday interviewed another homeless man targeted by the registration drive who exulted that he was voting for Obama because "I want him to do his thang. You know, do his thug thizzle."
"Thug thizzle" is street slang for performing your trademark move. Obama and ACORN have practiced their thug thizzle together for years: organizing an ever-expanding community of ineligible and marginal voters to expand the Democratic power base. Rules be damned.