Reform is one of the words that make up the acronym ACORN. That’s insulting to anyone who thinks things through. If I played a word association game on ACORN, the last word I’d think is reform. It’d be great if ACORN underwent a series of reforms but that isn’t likely to happen. CNN is reporting that ACORN is being investigated in Indiana:

More than 2,000 voter registration forms filed in northern Indiana’s Lake County by a liberal activist group this week have turned out to be bogus, election officials said Thursday.

The group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, already faces allegations of filing fraudulent voter registrations in Nevada and faces investigations in other states.

And in Lake County, home to the long-depressed steel town of Gary, the bipartisan Elections Board has stopped processing a stack of about 5,000 applications delivered just before the October 6 registration deadline after the first 2,100 turned out to be phony.

“All the signatures looked exactly the same,” Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican on the board. “Everything on the card filled out looks exactly the same.”

It’s long past time for the FBI and other investigative organizations to gather the information necessary to disband this renegade organization. We can’t afford to have this type of organization casting doubt on the election system.

This isn’t the first year that ACORN activists have been investigated for filling out fraudulent registration forms. I’ve used John Fund’s writings several times to highlight ACORN’s corruption. Here’s what Mr. Fund has written about ACORN:

Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year’s Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest, over 97%, were fake.

ACORN’s workers get paid for each registration they bring in. If an organization cared about eliminating voter registration corruption, they’d eliminate the incentives that tempted these employees into filling out these fraudulent registrations. This isn’t the first election cycle ACORN employees have done this, though. We know through John Fund’s writings that ACORN was doing this in the 2004 election cycle. It wouldn’t surprise me if ACORN has been doing this before that.

It’s likely that ACORN isn’t interested in eliminating the voter registration fraud. If Democrats thought that ACORN’s voter registration drives weren’t registering hundreds of thousands of voters, ACORN’s usefulness would be limited to threatening banks if that didn’t meet ACORN’s quota of loans to major credit risks.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, Voter Fraud, Subprime Lending, Voter Registration, Reform, Corruption, Scandal, Election 2008

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog