Obama's ACORN Connection to Voter Fraud

Hate to say it, but when one thinks of voter fraud, one usually associates it with the GOP, the 2000 election, and the debate over who won Florida. You remember, voting machines that didn't work, long lines to vote in predominantly Democratic districts, and recounts that weren't accurate.

This election brings with it stories of voter fraud, but this time on the Democratic side. It seems ACORN, a community organizing group that normally helps poor people with low-income housing issues, has registered thousands of people to vote in Democratic districts. Some of these supposed voters reportedly are dead, nonexistent, or use storefronts as their home addresses, as told by CNN:

CAMPBELL BROWN: Now, it is officially nonpartisan. But this group works hard to register low-income voters who tend to vote for Democrats. ACORN's under fire over allegedly phony voter registration in several states, and Drew Griffin of CNN's Special Investigations Unit is digging into this for us. You'll be pretty surprised by what he found.

DREW GRIFFIN: There are 5,000 of them.

GRIFFIN: These.

HOAGLAND: These.

GRIFFIN: Those?

HOAGLAND: And these.

GRIFFIN: They are new voter registration applications turned in by the community organizing group, ACORN, which has launched a massive voter registration drive, and with 5,000 applications in this one county dumped just before the October 6 deadline; it looked to Elections Board Administrator Ruth Ann Hoagland like ACORN was extremely successful, until her workers began finding problems.

GRIFFIN: A lot of them?

HOAGLAND: 50 percent. We had close to 5,000 total from ACORN, and so far we have identified about 2,100.

GRIFFIN: So roughly half of them are bad.

HOAGLAND: Correct.

GRIFFIN: Registered to a dead person, registered as a person who lives at a fast-food shop.

HOAGLAND: Yes.

GRIFFIN: Or just all of them amazingly in the same hand.

HOAGLAND: Yes. Yes. All the signatures look exactly the same. Everything on the card filled out looks just the same.

GRIFFIN: Ruth Ann. Fraud?

HOAGLAND: We have no idea what the motive behind it is. It's just overwhelming to us.

GRIFFIN: It's not that some are bad. Once they started going through them, every one they looked at was bad.

As if that weren't bad enough, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN to help with voter registration, according to WiredPRNEws:

Barack Obama has strong ties to the group that pressured banks into making high-risk loans.

Fort Worth, TX (WiredPRNews.com)—ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, pressured banks into making mortgages to those who would otherwise not qualify for them, according to an October 7, 2008 article by Stanley Kurtz, which appeared on the website for National Review.

As all Americans are footing the bill for the $700 billion bailout to prevent the collapse the financial market, ACORN leader Madeline Talbot—who has close ties to Senator Obama—personally strong-armed banks into making mortgage loans to low income minorities in the Chicago area, according to the National Review article. Kurtz writes that ACORN intimidation tactics include showing up at the home of bankers, breaking into offices and flooding bank lobbies with protestors."

Despite all this, Senator Obama's website accuses the GOP of trying to smear him with ties to ACORN that he says were nonexistent.

But those "smears" predated the current ACORN association.