California Conservative

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is raising a ruckus about an AP article. Here’s a portion of their official statement on the AP article:

Despite a misleading first paragraph, the AP article actually contains not even a single allegation that ACORN has ever knowingly submitted a fraudulent application or sought to get an ineligible person to cast a ballot. The story wrongly conflates alleged fraudulent applications, incomplete applications, duplicate applications, and even complaints about bad handwriting, treating them as a manifestation of the same problem on ACORN’s part. An incomplete card or one with messy handwriting represents a legitimate attempt by a person to register to vote. While ACORN makes every effort to make sure applicants complete their applications, including calling them, before submitting them, this is not always possible. Duplicate applications are often the result of applicants who may not remember whether or not they are already registered to vote at their current address.

If I hadn’t known about ACORN’s prior activities, I might’ve bought some of that. Unfortunately for them, I have a memory of such things. They shouldn’t have protested that loudly because then I wouldn’t have googled them. Here’s what I found:

ACORN Voter Registration Fraud Allegations Are Just The Tip of The Iceberg
Illegalities, Fraud and Contradictions Detailed in Report on Lead Organizer of Florida’s Amendment 5

A Florida state attorney is investigating thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations associated with the leading organizer of Florida’s Amendment 5 ballot initiative. But this is just the tip of an iceberg of illegalities, fraud and contradictions connected to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In recent days, ACORN has been at the epicenter of reports on thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations across the nation, including many by ex-felons, submitted by ACORN employees in the presidential swing states of Ohio, Colorado, Missouri Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Minnesota.

It appears as though ACORN’s claim that the AP article doesn’t contain allegations of wrongdoing might be right. Unfortunately for them, there are other articles that contain quite specific details of their illegal activities. This is just one paragraph of one such article. There’s more to this article, too:

ACORN has paid workers for every voter registration card collected, a felony in Florida and also illegal in Missouri and Pennsylvania. ACORN also routinely accepted signatures for Amendment 5 from individuals who were not currently registered to vote, a requirement under Florida law. Voter registration and petition fraud is just the latest chapter in ACORN’s long sordid history.

Then there’s this:

In the late 1990s, ACORN’s Project Vote was involved in an $850,000 embezzling scheme, where union funds and kickbacks were used to illegally aid the 1996 re-election bid of then-Teamsters President Ron Carey. A New York federal jury found the Teamsters political director guilty of the conspiracy.

Then this:

In 1996, the Inspector General of the AmeriCorps program stripped a $1 million grant from the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC). When applying, AHC had denied any connections to ACORN, since the grant was not intended for political advocacy organizations. Evidence later uncovered by the Inspector General found that not only was AHC created by ACORN, engaged in numerous transactions with one another, and sharing staff and office space, but it utilized the AmeriCorps grant to increase ACORN membership, a violation of federal guidelines.

Why stop there?

Most egregiously, ACORN promotes ballot initiatives and local ordinances to force businesses to pay higher minimum wages, as they are currently doing with the minimum wage proposal in Amendment 5. In 1995, however, ACORN sued the state of California to have its employees exempted from the state minimum wage. ACORN argued that being forced to pay higher wages would mean that they would hire fewer employees, the very dilemma faced by businesses. Incredibly, ACORN stated that paying its employees a lower wage would allow them to be more sympathetic to the low- and moderate-income families they were attempting to help. ACORN argued that abiding by the state minimum wage would limit their ability to promote their agenda and would therefore be a violation of their First Amendment rights. The trial court judge dismissed ACORN’s suits, stating, “leaving aside the latter argument’s absurdity … we find ACORN to be laboring under a fundamental misconception of constitutional law.”

This is a classic case of winning a fight and getting clobbered in the war. It’s apparent that ACORN isn’t averse to using ‘extraordinary techniques’ to achieve its objectives.

Technorati Tags: Voter Fraud, ACORN, Minimum Wage, Litigation

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Corruption, Crime, Elections, Investigations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.