CHAPTER SIX
The Secular- Socialist Machine and ACORN’s Vote Fraud
Since the secular-socialist machine has to lie about its misuse of government money and power, it is a short step to engineering dishonest elections. Voter fraud, along with corruption and deceptive language, form a triad of dishonesty that the machine relies upon to maintain power among a people who decisively oppose its goals.
With a vested interest in rigged elections, the Left have opposed efforts to curb voter fraud, such as state laws requiring a valid ID to vote as well as measures to cull deceased voters, felons, and former residents from voter rolls. The movement also actively engages in vote fraud, often using homeless people. We see this chicanery in local elections—such as Xavier Suarez’s theft of the Miami electoral race with over 4,500 absentee ballots submitted by bribed homeless people—and on the national level—such as an Al Gore supporter bribing homeless people with cigarettes to vote in Minnesota during the 2000 presidential election.
The Left have also passed laws that make vote fraud easier. The first legislation signed by President Clinton was the 1993 Motor Voter law, which required states to offer the ability to register to vote without identification to anyone who shows up to an official office to use government services. States were also required to allow for mail-in voter registration—a method particularly susceptible to fraud—and they were prevented from clearing names from their voter rolls for at least eight years of those who had moved or died.
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.
ACORN: TAKING YOUR TAXES TO STEAL YOUR VOTE
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,
The list of “voters” registered in Washington included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, and actress Katie Holmes, as well as nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters.1
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.
OBAMA AND ACORN
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,
I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.
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,
Before I even get inaugurated, during the transition, we’re going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We’re going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda of the next presidency of the United States of America.
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:
These documents reflect systematic voter registration fraud by ACORN. It is a scandal that there has been no comprehensive criminal investigation and prosecution by the Justice Department into this evident criminal conduct. Given President Obama’s close connections to ACORN, including his campaign’s hiring of the ACORN’s Project Vote organization, it seems rather obvious why Attorney General Holder has failed to seriously investigate these and other alleged ACORN criminal activities.2
THE RESILIENCY OF THE SECULAR-SOCIALIST MACHINE
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,
ACORN was active in Ohio in the 2006 and 2008 elections, working to register thousands of low-income people to vote and get them to the polls. The group’s efforts were marred by irregularities, including one case in which ACORN workers allegedly induced a Cleveland man to register to vote 72 times, offering cigarettes as an incentive.3
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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Why Big Business and the Secular- Socialist Machine Are Natural Allies
The 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.
In light of the Democrats’ anti-big-business pose, many people are surprised to learn how much their supposed adversaries support them. As detailed in Obamanomics, a book by Washington Examiner lobbying editor Timothy Carney, during the 2008 election cycle, the securities, health insurance, and pharmaceutical industries, and even many of the biggest oil companies, gave more money to Democrats than Republicans.
This is nothing new. As the regulatory state has grown, big business has learned to use big government to protect itself from small business rivals. Meanwhile, the secular-socialist machine gladly accepts money and support from business interests. The Left can often easily pass new regulations when they get big business on board, and these laws help both parties: the Left create the illusion they’re standing up for the little guy, and big business gets clauses put into the laws that damage their small competitors.
National Review editor Jonah Goldberg discusses the long history of big-government corporatism in his book Liberal Fascism, and Amity Shlaes explores the same phenomenon in her account of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man. This history is incredibly instructive, though not well-known. For example, the regulatory reforms of the meat packing industry in the early 1900s, inspired by Upton Sinclair’s muckraking book The Jungle, were e
nacted with the enthusiastic cooperation of America’s largest meat packing corporations. That’s because they knew only the largest corporations could afford to comply with the new regulations, which drove their smaller competitors out of business. Sinclair himself wrote in 1906, “The Federal inspection of meat was, historically, established at the packers’ request. It is maintained and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers.”
There are countless similar examples. For instance, the railroad magnates of the late 1800s encouraged the government to protect them from smaller railroad lines, price wars, and the patchwork of inconsistent state laws. Although today’s textbooks claim the government formed the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop the big railroad companies, in fact the Commission helped these companies to guarantee profits, squash competition, and ensure regulations worked in their favor. Then-Attorney General Richard Olney made this clear in an 1892 letter to Charles E. Pickering, President of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad:
The Commission . . . can be made of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, at the same time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. . . . The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.
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