Project Vote Fraud-ObamACORN

Heritage Morning Bell rings the warning on ACORN and Barack Obama. I will give you most of it. (My post on the same subject today here):

Project Vote claims it is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is also a nonprofit corporation organized under Louisiana law but, since it actively “carries out multiple issue campaigns,” it is a partisan organization that is subject to federal taxation. This election year Project Vote and ACORN partnered to file 1.3 million new voter registrations, many of which have been proven to be utterly fraudulent . Project Vote proudly claims to have added large numbers of new voters to the rolls in 16 states. ACORN is now currently under investigation for encouraging vote fraud in 12 of them. Now the New York Times is reporting the Project Vote/ACORN partnership “may have led to violations of federal law.” Apparently, Project Vote isn’t exactly nonpartisan.[snip]

ACORN is just the tip of the left’s vote fraud efforts. After all, it is hard to get away with vote fraud if the media are investigating it. Enter the professional vote fraud deniers at Talking Points Memo who have defended ACORN’s fraudulent voter registration efforts and repeatedly denied that vote fraud exits. For example, when Heritage fellow Hans von Spakovsky published a paper detailing the recent history of voter fraud , Talking Points Memo responded by noting that the main case documented in the paper happened 24 years ago. Talking Points Memo completely ignored the other more recent cases of vote fraud that von Spakovsky documents, including incidents from Hoboken, N.J., and Noxubee, Miss., in 2007.

But those are just the examples von Spakovsky can fit into one paper. Since 2003, 38 people have been convicted of vote fraud in Indiana alone. And a 1998 House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight report identified 624 invalid votes by non-citizens and another 124 improper absentee ballots in a single House race alone. Those 624 illegal votes were identified only by matching Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) database records on citizen applications with voter roles. The House investigation did not have the resources to detect if any illegal aliens, not in INS databases, had voted. A 2005 Government Accountability Office report concluded that many district attorneys will not devote resource to prosecuting what they see as a “victimless and non-violent” crime. But this is not just the fault of local officials. Federal agencies make it next to impossible to prosecute possible illegal voting by refusing to cooperate.

The left’s efforts to cover up vote fraud extend past liberal activists like Talking Points Memo. ABC News has hired Talking Points Memo alum Justin Rood, who is now filing “straight news” stories propagating the liberal myth that vote fraud never happens. Conservatives have had to fight a biased media for years. Truly frightening is the efforts by Democrat officeholders to silence all dissent on the issue. Last week Obama for America general counsel Bob Bauer sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey directing him to investigate any Republican who mentioned ACORN’s vote fraud efforts.

This was not the first time Obama worked with ACORN. In 1995 Obama served as ACORN’s lead counsel in its suit to make it easier to file fraudulent voter registrations. In fact, Obama and ACORN share a common ideological: 1960s community organizer Saul Alinsky, who once wrote: “A People’s Organization is dedicated to an eternal war. … A war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play.” No fair play indeed.