[Vision2020] Obama isn't stealing this election, he paid ACORN to steal it.

[No Weatherman]

Obama camp downplays payments to ACORN
S.A. Miller
Friday, October 10, 2008

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's campaign distanced
itself Thursday from its $800,000 payment linked to the liberal ACORN
organization, which is under investigation in several states where it
is suspected of filing fraudulent voter registrations.

Federal Election Commission reports show ACORN-affiliated Citizens
Services Inc. got $832,598 from the Obama campaign for
get-out-the-vote work during the primaries. But those payments stopped
in May and the Obama campaign says they should not be an election
issue.

"This is going to be an historic election with unprecedented voter
participation, and we are committed to protecting the integrity of the
voting process," Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said. "We support local
officials in their efforts to investigate any fraudulent behavior and
the full prosecution of any illegal activities."

Still, the contributions to Citizens Services draw the Obama campaign
closer to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,
or ACORN, and the growing voter-fraud scandal that this week spread to
the battleground state of Ohio.

The elections board in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, is
reviewing about 65,000 voter cards submitted by ACORN after flagging
50 cards filled out for duplicate names, fictitious addresses,
noncitizens and recycled names and addresses of currently registered
voters, said board spokesman Mike West.

Similar probes reportedly are under way in other large Ohio counties.

Citizen Services is inextricably tied to ACORN. Along with nonprofit
sister organization Project Vote, Citizens Services and ACORN share
the same New Orleans address and the same executive staff while money
flows freely between the three entities. In 1996, Project Vote's tax
returns show it paid ACORN more than $4.6 million for campaign
services and Citizens Services more than $779,000 for legal and
administrative services.

The ACORN political action committee endorsed Mr. Obama for president.

Its national voter-registration drive — which is targeting low-income,
minority and young voters who tend to vote Democrat and likely favor
Mr. Obama at the polls — is implicated in investigations of bogus
voter applications in a dozen states, many of them battlegrounds.

Voter registration is key to Mr. Obama's election strategy. First-time
voters, especially students and minorities, helped fuel Mr. Obama's
primary wins, and his campaign is looking for the same results to
capture swing states such as Ohio on Nov. 4.

In the swing state of Michigan, Oakland County election officials
found more than 33,000 duplicate registrations, about two-thirds of
new applications since August. In some cases, the same name was
registered scores of times and in different jurisdictions, and ACORN
canvassers submitted most of those applications.

"There would be as many as 10 applications from the same person . . .
and they have 10 different signatures," said Joe Rozell, elections
director for Oakland County, part of the Detroit metropolitan area.
"It seems like the majority of the questionable applications are
coming from that organization," referring to ACORN.

New Mexico officials said they forwarded fraudulent voter
registrations involving ACORN to the U.S. Department of Justice, which
would neither confirm nor deny a voting rights investigation of the
group.

In Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Mr. Obama, Philadelphia voter
registration administrator Bob Lee said the state attorney general has
been alerted to more than 800 applications with false addresses — all
of them submitted by ACORN.

"ACORN has a real serious quality control issue," Mr. Lee said. "They
also have supervision issues. They need to reform their hiring
practices."

The group's voter-registration work is under investigation in Nevada,
Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin and Connecticut, where election officials in
Bridgeport flagged about 2,000 fraudulent applications for fake
addresses, fake people and even one misrepresenting a 7-year-old girl
as being 27.

Brian Mellor, legal counsel for ACORN and Project Vote, said the
Citizens Services was not involved in the voter-registration drive. He
said Project Vote provided the funding and ACORN provided the local
ground operation and ran day-to-day activities.

But James Terry, the chief political advocate for the nonpartisan
Consumer Rights League who tracks ACORN issues, said Citizen Services
and ACORN are one in the same.

"There is no way it is not coordinated," he said. "It is a
multimillion-dollar coordinated effort."

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain's campaign said Mr.
Obama's association with ACORN is part of a patter of questionable
associations with characters such as William Ayers, co-founder of the
radical 1960s group Weather Underground, and convicted Chicago
political fixer Tony Rezko.

"Whether voters consider Barack Obama's relationship with William
Ayers, Tony Rezko or ACORN, he has a litany of concerning associations
that should be fully examined," McCain campaign spokesman Ben Porritt
said.

ACORN representatives said the group was being unfairly smeared for
the wrongdoing of few errant employees.

They said ACORN staff worked closely with election officials to
identify bad applications in its massive voter registration drive,
which signed up 1.3 million new voters in 21 states for the
presidential election.

They said canvassers, who are paid for each registration application,
also defrauded ACORN by filing fraudulent applications.

"We worked with the election officials to root out employees that are
ripping us off," said Brian Mellor, legal counsel for ACORN and
Project Vote. "We did everything we could do and some election
officials dropped the ball and now are blaming us."

Elections officials in Milwaukee credited ACORN with alerting them to
suspicious voter registration, resulting in 26 ACORN workers facing
criminal investigations.

"We have thousands and thousands of employees all over the country
doing this," Mr. Mellor said. "Do you really expect every one of our
employees to be perfect? Probably not. Sorry."
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/10/obama-camp-downplays-payments-to-acorn/