Voter Fraud, Election Influence

[bigredbirdfan]

HOMELESS 'DRIVEN' TO VOTE OBAMA

By JEANE MacINTOSH

October 6, 2008

CLEVELAND - Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.

The huge effort by a pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, takes advantage of a quirk in the state's elections laws that allows people to register and cast ballots at the same time without having to prove residency.

Republicans have argued that the window could lead to widespread voter fraud because officials wouldn't have an opportunity to verify registration information before ballots were cast.

Among the volunteers were Yori Stadlin and Vivian Lehrer of the Upper West Side, who got married last week and decided to spend their honeymoon shepherding voters to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Early today, Stadlin's van picked up William Woods, 59, at the soup kitchen of the Bishop Cosgrove Center.

"I never voted before," Woods said, because of a felony conviction that previously barred him from the polls. "Without this service, I would have had no way to get here."

Wow. And such a well informed voter. Surely they aren't promised a free beer if they vote Obama. Absolute scumbags willing to do anything to win. Afterall ends justify the means.

Now real surprise for a community organizer linked to the most corrupt, voter fraud organization ACORN.

Please post any more instances of election stealing you can find.

[3wt]

LAS VEGAS -- Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state's office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.

Secretary of State spokesman Bob Walsh says ACORN is accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with false and duplicate names.

The raid comes two months after state and federal authorities formed a task force to pursue election-fraud allegations in Nevada.

NOW, I'm not one to say that either side is more corrupt than the other. But, the voter fraud thing really does seem to be generally associated with far left groups...

[jdmidwest]

Seems like the bum, Woods, that was interviewed still can't vote because he has a felony.

Katie C-rack on CBS last night run a story about all the voters that were going to have problems voting due to typo errors in their voter registration forms. They showed the states that have new voter regulations of showing an ID to vote. Sure looks like all the states that had the voter fraud that fouled the 2000 election. Florida and Mo were there.

Just because they are registered to vote does not mean they are going to get off their lazy butt and do their duty on election day. Interesting theory came up yesterday about the last minute mudslinging that is starting in October between Obama and McCain. Seems that historically, 2 candidates that get nasty at the end of the election turns off new voters and they don't even get out to vote leaving only the ones that can make an educated decision at the polling place on election day.

Do I see something brewing here that will hurt Obama and his new, uneducated, first time voters?

Not that the stuff that is coming out against Obama is not true.

He was friends with Ayers, who was a militant that wanted to bomb the pentagon.

He did go to church with the hate monger racist Rev. Wright for a long time.

He is the least experienced candidate ever to run for president.

He has tried to distance himself from alot of un-desireables that he has had shady dealings with like the real estate guy in Chicago and the Fannie/Freddie connections.

And somebody is pumping alot of money into a candidate that in all reality should have lost out in the first rounds.

Of course this should not affect anyone's decision on his ability to be President of the United States.

[taxidermist]

The Arabs are pumping the money!! Local Exxon distr. is now owned by the Arabs, they gave $50,000 to the Obama campain and these ragheads are not US citizens!

[bigredbirdfan]

Missouri officials suspect fake voter registration By BILL DRAPER, Associated Press Writer

Wed Oct 8, 9:45 PM ET

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Most polls show Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an edge in bellwether Missouri, but Democrat Barack Obama continues to put up a strong fight.

Jess Ordower, Midwest director of ACORN, said his group hasn't done any registrations in Kansas City since late August. He said he was told three weeks ago by election officials that there were only about 135 questionable cards — 85 of them duplicates.

"They keep telling different people different things," he said. "They gave us a list of 130, then told someone else it was 1,000."

FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said the agency has been in contact with elections officials about potential voter fraud and plans to investigate.

"It's a matter we take very seriously," Patton said. "It is against the law to register someone to vote who does not fall within the parameters to vote, or to put someone on there falsely."

On Tuesday, authorities in Nevada seized records from ACORN after finding fraudulent registration forms that included the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.

Ordower said Wednesday that ACORN registered about 53,500 people in Missouri this year. He believes his group is being targeted because some politicians don't want that many low-income people having a voice.

"It's par for the course," he said. "When you're doing more registrations than anyone else in the country, some don't want low-income people being empowered to vote. There are pretty targeted attacks on us, but we're proud to be out there doing the patriotic thing getting people registered to vote."

Republicans are among ACORN's loudest critics. At a campaign stop in Bethlehem, Pa., supporters of John McCain interrupted his remarks Wednesday by shouting, "No more ACORN."

Debbie Mesloh, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Missouri, said in an e-mailed statement that the campaign supported any investigation of possible fraud.

According to its national Web site, the group has registered 1.3 million people nationwide for the Nov. 4 election. It also has encountered complaints of fraud stemming from registration efforts in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada and battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina, where new voter registrations have favored Democrats nearly 4 to 1 since the beginning of this year.

Missouri offers 11 electoral votes; the presidential candidates need at least 270 to win the election.

[bigredbirdfan]

NUTS!

By JEANE MacINTOSH, Post Correspondent

Christopher Barkley

Last updated: 8:01 am

October 9, 2008

Posted: 4:31 am

October 9, 2008

CLEVELAND - Two Ohio voters, including Domino's pizza worker Christopher Barkley , claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they'd already signed up.

Barkley estimated he'd registered to vote "10 to 15" times after canvassers for ACORN, whose political wing has endorsed Barack Obama, relentlessly pursued him and others.

Claims such as his have sparked election officials to probe ACORN.

"I kept getting approached by folks who asked me to register," Barkley said. "They'd ask me if I was registered. I'd say yes, and they'd ask me to do it [register] again.

"Some of them were getting paid to collect names. That was their sob story, and I bought it," he said.

Barkley is one of at least three people who have been subpoenaed by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections as part of a wider inquiry into possible voter fraud by ACORN. The group seeks to register low-income voters, who skew overwhelmingly Democratic.

"You can tell them you're registered as many times as you want - they do not care," said Lateala Goins, 21, who was subpoenaed.

"They will follow you to the buses, they will follow you home, it does not matter," she told The Post.

She added that she never put down an address on any of the registration forms, just her name.

A third subpoenaed voter, Freddie Johnson, 19, filled out registration cards 72 times over 18 months, officials said.

"It feeds the public perception that there could be [fraud], and that makes the pillars fall down," said local Board of Elections President Jeff Hastings.

Registering under a fake name is illegal. But officials usually catch multiple registrations and toss them.

The major risk of fraud growing out of mass canvassing involves the possibility of ineligible voters filing absentee ballots, and thus avoiding checks at polling places, said Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross.

The subpoenas come as Republicans have ramped up criticism of ACORN. Officials in Nevada raided ACORN's Las Vegas office Tuesday, accusing the group of signing people up multiple times - in some cases under phony names, like those of Dallas Cowboys.

ACORN's Cleveland spokesman, Kris Harsh, said his group collected 100,000 voter-registration cards; only about 50 were questionable, he claimed.

As for workers, "We watch them like a hawk," he said.

[bigredbirdfan]

Friday, October 10, 2008

Last Update: 03:00 PM EDT

1 VOTER, 72 REGISTRATIONS

'ACORN PAID ME IN CASH & CIGS'

October 10, 2008

CLEVELAND - A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.

"Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they'll give me a dollar to sign up," said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

"The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, 'You are?' I say, 'Yup,' and then they say, 'Can you just sign up again?' " he said.

Johnson used the same information on all of his registration cards, and officials say they usually catch and toss out duplicate registrations. But the practice sparks fear that some multiple registrants could provide different information and vote more than once by absentee ballot.

ACORN is under investigation in Ohio and at least eight other states - including Missouri, where the FBI said it's planning to look into potential voter fraud - for over-the-top efforts to get as many names as possible on the voter rolls regardless of whether a person is registered or eligible.

It's even under investigation in Bridgeport, Conn., for allegedly registering a 7-year-old girl to vote, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

Meanwhile, a federal judge yesterday ordered Ohio's Secretary of State to verify the identity of newly registered voters by matching them with other government documents. The order was in response to a Republican lawsuit unrelated to the ACORN probe in Cuyahoga County, in which at least three people, including Johnson, have been subpoenaed.

Bribing citizens with gifts, property or anything of value is a fourth-degree felony in Ohio, punishable by up to 18 months in prison. And it's a fifth-degree felony - punishable by 12 months in jail - for a person to pay "compensation on a fee-per-registration" system when signing up someone to vote.

Johnson, who works at a cellphone kiosk in downtown Cleveland, said he was a sitting duck for the signature hunters, but was always happy to help them out in exchange for a smoke or a little scratch. He'd collected 10 to 20 cigarettes and anywhere from $10 to $15, he said.

The Cleveland voting probe, first reported by The Post yesterday, also focused on Lateala Goins, who said she put her name on multiple voter registrations. She guessed ACORN canvassers then put fake addresses on them. "You can tell them you're registered as many times as you want - they do not care," she said.

ACORN spokesman Kris Harsh said the group does not tolerate its workers paying people to sign the voter-registration cards.

ACORN's political wing has endorsed Barack Obama for president, but Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign in Ohio, said ACORN has no role in its get-out-the-vote drive.

During the primary season, however, the Obama camp paid another group, Citizen Service Inc., $832,598 for various political services, according to Federal Elections Commission filings. That group and ACORN share the same board of directors.

In Wisconsin yesterday, John McCain blasted ACORN.

"No one should be corrupting the most precious right we have, that is the right to vote," he said.

It's a right Johnson will exercise. "Yeah, I've registered enough - I might as well vote."

[bigredbirdfan]

Local 2 Investigates Dead Voters

POSTED: 11:16 am CDT October 9, 2008

UPDATED: 9:08 am CDT October 10, 2008

HOUSTON -- Note: The following story is a verbatim transcript of an Investigators story that aired on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2008, on KPRC Local 2 at 10 p.m.

Local 2 investigates dead voters.

The push to register voters for this year's presidential election is breaking records.

More than 1.9 million people are registered to vote in Harris County alone.

But how many of the people listed on the voter roll are actually eligible to cast a ballot?

Investigative reporter Amy Davis shows you how hundreds of voters could sway this year's election -- voters who are not even alive.

"All-in-all, a great person, a great woman, just a wonderful person" is how Alexis Guidry described her mother to Local 2 Investigates.

"As far back as I can remember, they've always voted in the election," Guidry said of her parents.

The March 2008 Primary was no exception. Voting records show Alexis' mom, Gloria Guidry, cast her ballot in person near her South Houston home.

"It was just very shocking, a little unsettling," said Alexis Guidry.

It's unsettling because Gloria Guidry died of cancer 10 months before the March Primary.

"She'd be very upset," Guidry said when asked what her mom would think.

Trent Seibert, of Texas Watchdog, says you should be too.

"This is really disquieting. It's concerning. It's worrisome," said Seibert.

He heads up the non-partisan news group on the web.

Texas Watchdog compared Harris County's voter registration roll with the Social Security death index and found more than 4,000 matches -- registered voters that, it appears, are already dead.

Some of them, like Henderson Hill's late wife Linda, voted postmortem.

"I would like to know who did it, myself," Hill told Davis.

We don't know who used Linda Hill's or Gloria Guidry's IDs to vote, but we do know if their names had been purged from voter rolls after they died, using their IDs wouldn't have worked.

"This is a red flag. No matter where you are, this should set off alarm bells," Seibert said. "Someone needs to take a look at this."

Local 2 Investigates took the information to the Harris County Voter Registrar.

"We just kind of work with the systems that we're allowed to," explained George Hammerlein, the director of Harris County Voter Registration.

The county's system for culling deceased voters from the roll seems painfully primitive.

We watched employees clip obituaries from the newspaper and sort through probate records for names matching those on the roll. But, Hammerlein says while fraud is a concern, for his office, disenfranchising voters is a bigger one.

"We do all we can, but you know we'd rather err on the side of leaving people on the roll instead of taking them off inadvertently," he said.

But could that cautious "better safe than sorry" standard sway an election some say will be a close one?

Texas Watchdog found 4,462 registered voters who appear to be deceased.

In 2000, George Bush won the presidential election by a mere 537 votes in Florida.

"We've never had any evidence there's a concerted attempt at fraud," Hammerlein told Local 2.

But there is evidence the state agency in charge of ensuring only eligible voters can vote is not.

The State Auditor's Office conducted an audit of the voter registration system at the Secretary of State's Office last November.

Auditors identified 49,049 registered voters state-wide who may have been ineligible to vote. Approximately 23,576 may have been deceased and another 23,114 were possible felons. And they found more than 2,359 duplicate records.

The auditor did not find any instances in which potentially ineligible voters actually voted, but they wrote, "Although the Secretary of State's office has processes to identify many ineligible voters and remove them from the State's voter registration list, improvements can be made."

Almost a year after this audit, we wanted to know if the Secretary of State has made any improvements. Have they added any safeguards to the process?

No one from that office would talk to us on camera, but the Director of Elections told us, "We'd rather err in leaving someone on the roll than taking someone off."

"If there's something wrong here, if there's something amiss, this is the worst election to have that happen, "Seibert warned.

And Guidry agrees.

"I don't think it's a matter that she would take lightly," she said of her mom.

In what she calls an historic election, Guidry says her mother wouldn't want anyone speaking for her.

"I think she would definitely do all that she could just to make sure things were on the up and up."

We sent the information we showed you to the Director of Elections in Austin. She said her office refers any credible allegation of election fraud to the Attorney General for investigation.

She said the cases we presented would be felony violations

[sparkleminnow]

ELECTION Day this year may bring the kind of chaos you expect from a category-five hurricane - with radical groups sending the nation into a protracted legal battle even worse than the mess back in 2000. To prevent it, we must act now.

Developments in several states create the possibility that the 2008 vote could result in "Election Month," rather than Election Day. Court rulings on various absentee-voting procedures - along with early voting and other new forms of balloting - open the door to widespread abuses that could undermine the election. The possibility of voter fraud or voting irregularities on a massive scale could provide a multistate repeat of Florida 2000.

A perfect example is Ohio. Last Monday the Ohio Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, interpreted Ohio law to allow for people to register to vote and cast an absentee ballot on the same day.

(As the three dissenters noted, this directly contradicts Ohio's Constitution, which requires that a person register to vote 30 days in advance of actually casting that vote. But the Ohio Supreme Court is the last word on Ohio state law.)

So now the Obama campaign is using buses to take tens of thousands of people to go register and cast same-day votes. Some media reports say that the Obama camp hopes to get hundreds of thousands of votes this way.

Ohio decided the election in 2004, and may do it again this year. President Bush won the state by 118,000 votes - just over 10 votes per precinct. Flip just 60,000 votes, and we'd be in the middle of President John Kerry's re-election contest.

Enter ACORN, a group notorious for its extremist approach to pushing "social change." Criminal investigations of ACORN personnel for felony voter fraud are under way or completed in about a dozen states, with multiple indictments and even convictions.

Sen. Barack Obama's record of working with ACORN dates back to before he ever ran for office, and continues today. His campaign has channeled more than $800,000 into ACORN's political-action arm for election activities. This relationship alone deserves far more scrutiny than it has gotten so far.

With ACORN and similar groups flooding swing states like Ohio with teams of operatives, there is a possibility for voter fraud on a scale never before seen in this country. (ACORN alone has perhaps 100,000 members in 50 US cities.)

As a nation, we must act now, before Election Day, to prevent voter fraud. If we don't, we could again enter December still fighting about who the next president will be. Imagine Florida-style litigation going on in multiple states, with countless disputes about who is a legal resident and where their ballot was cast, and you'll see what we could be facing.

The key is to closely scrutinize all of these activities beforehand - so that we do not find ourselves in a chaotic situation after the polls close.

The right to vote is a fundamental right. It is violated when a qualified voter is denied his or her vote - and also when a legal vote is canceled out by an illegal vote.

Voter fraud is a crime against democracy itself, because voting is the only means by which the people choose those who govern them - and hold them accountable. The voting process therefore deserves the most stringent protections to make sure that every legal vote is counted, and that only legal votes are counted.

Authorities must act quickly to safeguard the integrity of the voting process before Nov 4.

Ken Blackwell is a former Ohio secretary of state and a fellow at the American Civil Rights Union. Ken Klukowski is a policy consultant and legal analyst from Indiana.

[bigredbirdfan]

Chief and Fishhand: What is the left's official position on these events? I noticed you guys are silent on this topic. Why?