Mountain Sage

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has a long history of filing fraudulent voter registrations and this election season is no exception.

In October, 2006, four workers from ACORN were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board.

In 2007 Prosecutors in King and Pierce counties (Washington) filed felony charges against seven employees of ACORN, claiming they turned in more than 1,800 phony voter-registration forms, including an estimated 55 in Pierce County.

In fact, the fraud charges started as far back as 1998. ACORN has been charged with voter fraud in at least 14 states:
SOURCE

A recent report shows that ACORN is still up to it’s old tricks, this time in Gary, Indiana :

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.

via SOURCE

And the state of Michigan:

The Michigan branch of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), located in Detroit, is being investigated after several municipal clerks reported fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications coming through.

The majority of the fraudulent and duplicate applications are coming from the liberal ACORN group based in Detroit, Michigan, which now has ACORN investigating the problem once again as well as the Secretary of State’s Office turning over some of those applications to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. SOURCE

Given the level of fraud ACORN has been engaged in why would Senator Barack Obama pay over $800,000 to ACORN and did the Obama campaign try to hide the actual activity they paid ACORN for?

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat’s campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.

An Obama spokesman said Federal Election Commission reports would be amended to show Citizens Services Inc. — a subsidiary of ACORN — worked in “get-out-the-vote” projects, instead of activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary. SOURCE

In doing research for this article I ran across this statement in an article by Stanley Kurtz: We find some important details in an article in the journal Social Policy entitled, “Case Study: Chicago — The Barack Obama Campaign,” by Toni Foulkes,

When I tried to read that article I found that I was unable to access the Social Policy website …I tried to sign up for a membership and subscription but the site seems to be out of order. So, here is a quote from Kurtz’s article:

The extent of Obama’s ties to Acorn has not been recognized. We find some important details in an article in the journal Social Policy entitled, “Case Study: Chicago — The Barack Obama Campaign,” by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago Acorn leader and a member of Acorn’s National Association Board. The odd thing about this article is that Foulkes is forced to protect the technically “non-partisan” status of Acorn’s get-out-the-vote campaigns, even as he does everything in his power to give Acorn credit for helping its favorite son win the critical 2004 primary that secured Obama the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate.

Before giving us a tour of Acorn’s pro-Obama but somehow “non-partisan” election activities, Foulks treats us to a brief history of Obama’s ties to Acorn. While most press accounts imply that Obama just happened to be at the sort of public-interest law firm that would take Acorn’s “motor voter” case, Foulkes claims that Acorn specifically sought out Obama’s representation in the motor voter case, remembering Obama from the days when he worked with Talbot. And while many reports speak of Obama’s post-law school role organizing “Project VOTE” in 1992, Foulkes makes it clear that this project was undertaken in direct partnership with Acorn. Foulkes then stresses Obama’s yearly service as a key figure in Acorn’s leadership-training seminars.

At least a few news reports have briefly mentioned Obama’s role in training Acorn’s leaders, but none that I know of have said what Foulkes reports next: that Obama’s long service with Acorn led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000 (Foulkes confuses the dates of these two campaigns.) With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago Acorn leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and Acorn were “old friends,” says Foulkes.
SOURCE

On October 6, 2008, Fox News asked what relationship Barack Obama has to ACORN.
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I don’t doubt that Barack Obama has long standing ties to ACORN and ACORN has a longstanding history of fraud, so why was Obama so willing to be tied to ACORN to assist his campaign in getting out the vote? Does Obama think we are too stupid to connect the dots or does he just not care?