To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (14 page)

As a result, voter registration has jumped 20 percent, but improper registrations have also exploded. An
Indianapolis Star
investigation in 2000 reported that as many as one in five names on Indiana’s voter rolls was invalid.

By abolishing ID requirements, Motor Voter has allowed illegal aliens to register to vote. A 1996 investigation in Orange County, California, found that more than 4,000 illegal voters may have cast ballots in the congressional race between Robert Dornan and Loretta Sanchez. Dornan lost by less than 1,000 votes.

Every time responsible legislators introduce bills to approve ID requirements for voting or to allow states to keep their voter rolls up to date, the secular-socialist machine responds with charges of racism. For instance, a 2005 Georgia law requiring an ID to cast a ballot was challenged in court by left-wing organizations that claimed it disenfranchised the poor and minorities. During the course of two years of litigation, however, the plaintiffs could not find a
single
eligible voter in Georgia who was disenfranchised by the Georgia law.

The sad truth about the spurious cries of racism is that the real disenfranchisement of American voters comes
from
voter fraud, not from efforts to
prevent
it. After all, every fraudulent vote cancels out the vote of an honest citizen.

Of all the parts of the secular-socialist machine engaging in vote fraud, ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) is the most notorious. Its criminal behavior and thuggish tactics are a perfectly logical product of the secular-socialist rejection of the virtue of honesty. It makes a mockery of the American ideal of “one person, one vote.”

ACORN’s agenda is, as Sol Stern wrote in
City Journal
, “anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology and government handouts.” As documented in Michelle Malkin’s
Culture of Corruption
, in addition to conducting fraudulent voter registration efforts—for which ACORN workers have repeatedly been indicted—the group pickets the houses of bankers and uses other forms of intimidation to pressure banks to give home loans to the poor (who can’t afford them). As recently as 2009, the group staged an illegal break-in of a foreclosed home as a PR stunt.

Nate Toler, who worked for ACORN until late 2006 on voter registration drives and on a campaign against Wal-Mart, spoke to the
Wall Street Journal
about the organization’s dishonesty. “The internal motto is, ‘We don’t care if it’s a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation.’ ” On ACORN’s voter registration efforts, he said, “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances.”

Similarly, Mac Stuart, a former Florida ACORN employee, has accused the group of failing to deliver registration cards marked “Republican,” accepting applications from felons, and falsifying information.

Wall Street Journal
columnist John Fund has written arguably the definitive work on vote fraud and vote theft in America. In
Stealing Elections
he outlines the multi-faceted strategies the secular-socialist machine employs to fraudulently register voters and to strike down anti-fraud laws. Fund’s many ACORN-related examples
demonstrate the group’s shocking disrespect for the law. In July 2007, for example, prosecutors indicted seven Seattle ACORN workers for turning in falsified registration forms. As Fund explains,

Fund then notes the rules that enable this fraud: “Given that the state doesn’t require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible that people could have voted illegally using some of those names.”

Overall, of 1,805 names submitted by ACORN in King County, over 97 percent were found to be invalid. Washington’s secretary of state called it “the worst case of voter registration fraud” in the state’s history.

There’s more.

In spring 2008, county registrar’s offices in Louisiana noticed a huge increase in the number of suspicious and outright fraudulent voter registration forms. In Shreveport, the registrar’s office reported that only 2,200 of its 6,000 forms were valid. The mischief was traced back to ACORN and to a national Democratic Party effort called Voting Is Power. After they were caught, instead of promising to clean up their act, Democrats hurled meaningless accusations at the registrar’s offices. “Instead of throwing up complaints, they should be working to get as many people as possible registered,” said Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

That was no isolated incident. In Kansas City, Missouri, four ACORN employees pleaded guilty to registration fraud in November 2006. Forty percent of the 35,000 registrations submitted by
ACORN there were found to be fraudulent.

And in St. Louis, Missouri, eight ACORN workers pleaded guilty to federal election fraud in April 2008. City officials claimed more than 1,000 of the addresses on the registration forms submitted by ACORN during that election cycle didn’t exist.

What makes these stories even more outrageous is that ACORN has been a steady recipient of government funding throughout its 40-year history. Until recently, taxpayer dollars accounted for up to 40 percent of its budget. According to the
Washington Examiner
, ACORN received $53 million in federal funds between 1994 and 2009. Most of this money was supposed to fund housing assistance programs, but it would be naïve to think none of this money actually went to ACORN’s other activities, like its corrupt voting drives.

In fact, we
know
ACORN manipulated its funds in this way. In 1994, the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC) received a $1.1 million grant from AmeriCorps, the federal volunteer agency. ACORN claimed the AHC was a separate entity from ACORN, but the grant was cancelled a year later after the inspector general for AmeriCorps found that “AHC used AmeriCorps grant funds to benefit ACORN either directly or indirectly,” including its lobbying activities and growing its membership roles.

And yet, the flow of government money to ACORN continued anyway.

Despite its long association with voter fraud efforts, the Obama White House enlisted ACORN as an official partner of the U.S. Census Bureau to help recruit more than a million census-takers for 2010. Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, noted that “the Census Bureau offered ACORN the opportunity to ‘recruit Census workers’ who would participate in the count. Moreover, as an ‘executive level, partner, ACORN has the ability
to ‘organize and/or serve as a member on a Complete Count Committee,’ which, according to Census documents, helps ‘develop and implement locally based outreach and recruitment campaigns.’ ”

That the White House should enlist an organization specializing in voter fraud to help organize the census should not be surprising, considering President Obama’s long history with the group. As detailed in
Stealing Elections
, in 1993 Obama ran a voter registration drive in Illinois that helped to get Democrat Carol Moseley Braun elected to the U.S. Senate. Obama conducted that campaign for Project Vote, an ACORN-affiliated group that later worked for Obama’s presidential campaign.

Obama served as ACORN’s attorney in 1995, when the group sued Illinois governor Jim Edgar to implement the Motor Voter law in Illinois. Obama also trained ACORN members in community organizing tactics and provided ACORN with funding as a board member of the Woods Fund, a foundation that funds left-wing organizations and causes.

In 1996, Obama filled out a questionnaire in advance of his Illinois state senate run. When asked which groups would support his campaign, he listed ACORN first. And as a U.S. Senator, he echoed ACORN’S criticism of voter ID laws. As Obama said himself in a February 2008 speech to ACORN leaders,

Before he became president, Obama proudly and publicly declared that ACORN-style “community organizing” groups would influence
his administration. When asked at a December 2007 Democratic campaign forum for community organizers whether he’d meet with a delegation of community groups at the beginning of his presidency, Obama replied,

Once in power, the Obama administration went to remarkable lengths to protect ACORN, as seen in its handling of complaints of ACORN voter registration fraud during the 2008 election in two Connecticut cities, Stamford and Bridgeport. According to complaints submitted by the towns’ Republican registrars of voters, ACORN submitted hundreds of invalid registrations including, for example, a 7-year-old who was registered using a forged signature and a fake birth certificate. Based on FBI documents, Judicial Watch disclosed that soon after Obama took office, his Justice Department closed down an official investigation of the cases, claiming ACORN had not done anything illegal.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton did not mince words about how the investigation was quashed:

Many observers thought ACORN’s rampant law-breaking was finally over in September 2009, when an undercover filmmaker released footage of employees from multiple ACORN offices advising him, while posing as a pimp, and his partner, who posed as a prostitute, how to set up a child prostitution ring. Responding to public outrage, Congress overwhelmingly approved a law barring ACORN from receiving federal money. (A judge later overturned the law, though Congress did not give ACORN any more funds.) The uproar also cost ACORN its role in the 2010 census.

ACORN seemed to be on the ropes. In Ohio, as part of a legal settlement, the group agreed to cease operating in the entire state. The
Columbus Dispatch
reported,

The victory, however, was short-lived, showing just how resilient the secular-socialist machine is. While the national ACORN organization has shut down, many of the group’s branches have simply re-formed under new names while using the same tactics to pursue the same agenda.

In addition to federal money, the “new” groups will be eligible to receive money from the states—and that’s a lot. As the
Washington Times
reported in February 2010, shortly before ACORN disbanded, ACORN was eligible for up to $4 billion in HUD Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) that are doled out by state and local governments. Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at Capital Research Center, told the
Times
it’s difficult to track the money once it goes through state and local governments. “Nobody knows how much ACORN, which has hundreds of different affiliates, has actually received over the years in CDBG funding,” he said.

In other words, it’s business as usual for the machine.

 

 

 

T
he Left love to bash big business on behalf of the “little guy.” Their rhetoric goes like this:
We’ll use the power of government to protect consumers from the greedy robber barons of big business who constantly rip off customers and employees. Meanwhile, conservatives, at the behest of their corporate donors, cruelly block liberals from passing new laws protecting Americans from these evil corporations.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: it bears zero resemblance to reality.

Here is a more accurate narrative: big business knows the greatest threat to its survival is not government regulation, but competition with smaller, more innovative firms. So when the opportunity arises to cooperate with government in crafting new
regulations for their industry, big business lobbyists don’t oppose the reforms; instead, they help write the laws to their own advantage.

The sordid truth of the Left’s push for ever-greater regulation of private industry is this: it is not meant to protect consumers against big business. It’s meant to bring big business into their political machine.

The Left’s message to business is simple: support our regulatory schemes or get crushed. In other words, either take a seat at the table, or risk being on the menu. And they know that big business—the only ones that can afford a seat at the table—will pay whatever it takes to join them.