One of ACORN’s champions on Capitol Hill, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Illinois), has an illuminating article in Arianna Huffington’s gossip website, the Huffington Post.

After the names of several Dallas Cowboys football players showed up on voter rolls in Nevada, Jackson argued that “Obviously it’s not right for a fake ‘Tony Romo’ to be registered in Las Vegas…but remember the basic point — it’s not voter fraud unless someone shows up at the voting booth on Election Day and tries to pass himself off as ‘Tony Romo.’”

So, it’s OK to attempt to commit vote fraud as long as you don’t succeed?

MoveOn.org thug Tom Matzzie, who now heads Accountable America which tries to frighten donors into not giving to conservative causes, says the same thing, casually dismissing concerns about vote fraud as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy:

If somebody submits a card for Mickey Mouse it isn’t like Mr. Mouse is going to show up to vote. There is no voter fraud if nobody votes.

But the big story here is what the Right is doing. Their attacks on ACORN open up the door for two things.

Poll precinct officials aren’t likely to be fooled by “Mickey Mouse,” but what if an impostor shows up at polling place with a more credible-sounding name?

In any event, an FBI spokeswoman said both Jackson and Matzzie are dead wrong. Bridget Patton told reporters, ”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.”

Meanwhile, Seth Colter Walls of the Huffington Post hasn’t responded yet to our blog post that proves that Barack Obama worked for ACORN’s Project Vote way back in 1992. The HuffPost and the Obama campaign have been trying without success to argue that Obama never worked for ACORN because, they say, Project Vote had nothing to do with ACORN back then.

The evidence shows otherwise.

And an article in the Politico today suggests that the ACORN-Obama link is somehow new. No, it’s not. We reported on it in our profile of Barack Obama in the June Foundation Watch, and it was reported elsewhere previously. 

It has also been widely reported that the Obama campaign funneled about $800,000 to an ACORN subsidiary called Citizens Services Inc. It is quite odd for a presidential campaign to make a donation to a charitable organization, and it’s even stranger to give that donation to a group that is in the vote fraud business.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under ACORN, Advocacy/Activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.