Stranger Than Fiction: Nexis Search Shows the Media’s Reported Nexus Between ACORN and Crack Cocaine (Hey, don’t blame us: we’re just the messengers.)
October 31st, 2008 by Matthew Vadum
Truth is stranger than fiction.
Last night I appeared on a pre-taped segment of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” The reporter on the satirical show, John Oliver, and I discussed community organizing. I said in the segment that aired, “community organizers use crack cocaine in exchange for votes.”
The segment aired, coincidentally, the night before another story about community organizers and cocaine broke. KyPost.com reported today that a self-identified ACORN worker who allegedly uses crack and is allegedly a prostitute just got arrested in Ohio.
Returning to the statement I made on “The Daily Show” that has been relentlessly attacked in the media, to say community organizers use cocaine as a kind of currency sounds completely bizarre and absurd.
When I first learned about it I immediately thought of Rep. Maxine Waters’s similarly absurd-sounding allegation that the CIA was trafficking in crack cocaine. The Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 31, 1997 on the lawmaker’s nonsensical conspiracy theory:
Fresh from a fact-finding trip to Nicaragua, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) told an attentive audience at Cal State Northridge on Thursday that she planned to continue investigating charges that the CIA had a role in the crack boom that has crippled sections of her South Los Angeles district.
“I went to Nicaragua recently and met with someone in prison,” she said to the racially diverse crowd of students and teachers. “And I will go back again if I have to. I’m going to go wherever the story takes me.
Perhaps the Waters story, because it’s so freakishly bizarre and unusual, somehow still lingers in the minds of journalists.
But it is amazing what short memories they have. They seem to have forgotten that the story of community organizers using crack cocaine as payment in voter-registration drives in 2004 was widely reported by a vast array of credible media outlets
According to several media reports, left-wing community organizer groups including ACORN and the NAACP (National Voter Fund) have been alleged to have used the illegal drug as payment in voter drives.
To demonstrate the nexus between community organizer group and crack cocaine today we visited Nexis, an online subscription-based database of, among other things, news reports.
Some of the reports identify different groups. Most associate the crack incidents with ACORN, but others associate it with another community organizing group, the NAACP’s National Voter Fund.
We did a “Power Search” using “Natural Language” with the following keywords: “cocaine voter acorn” (without quotation marks). We searched for stories between Jan. 1, 2004 and Dec. 31, 2004, under the category of “News, All (English, Full Text).” The reason we used 2004 is because that’s when the story broke. Searching the entire year provides an excellent picture of how the media followed the story.
This search generated 22 hits. Some of the stories found are relevant to ACORN, the group, and some aren’t.
The stories that deal with ACORN’s voting-related activities (as opposed to other stories related to different topics such a park whose name includes the word acorn) and are therefore relevant to this inquiry are below. The least pertinent paragraphs have been excised – otherwise this blog post would turn into a book.
Don’t trust us: Feel free to confirm all of this for yourself.
Here goes:
1) Cox News Service, October 19, 2004 Tuesday, GOP charges voter fraud in Ohio, BYLINE: TOM BEYERLEIN
[…] Party officials recapped a list of allegations of voter registration fraud by canvassers working for private organizations in traditionally Democratic precincts, mostly in northern Ohio and Franklin and Hamilton counties. Among them: the attempted registration of a dead man in Cuyahoga County and Monday’s arrest in Defiance County of a man accused of falsifying 130 registration cards with names like Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins in exchange for crack cocaine. […]
“What this is really about is that we have hundreds of thousands of new voters in the state of Ohio and the Republican Party is terrified these people are going to come out and vote,” said Jess Goode of America Coming Together, or ACT, one of the canvassing groups lambasted by the Republicans. “The truth is, the Republican Party is undertaking the largest voter-suppression effort ever undertaken in Ohio.” […]
ACORN spokeswoman Katy Gall said the GOP challenger efforts “reek of voter suppression.”
She said “voter fraud is completely abhorrent,” and ACORN has cooperated fully with investigations of fraud by some ACORN canvassers.
2) Cox News Service, October 19, 2004 Tuesday, GOP charges voter fraud in Ohio, BYLINE: TOM BEYERLEIN.
This is a shorter version of #1.
3) National Public Radio (NPR), October 19, 2004 Tuesday, SHOW: Day to Day 4:00 PM EST NPR, Process of registering voters becomes a highly politicized issue in several states, ANCHORS: NOAH ADAMS, REPORTERS: MIKE PESCA.
[…] PESCA: One of the cases Mauk cited concerns a Toledo-area man who allegedly filled out voter registration cards in exchange for crack cocaine. Even if the allegations are true, it’s questionable if the forms he filled out using names like Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins would have resulted in any fraudulent votes.
Mauk blames most fraud, though, on outside groups, non-Ohioans who have registered tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of new voters in his state. One such group is ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN itself has been accused of dirty tricks. For instance, in Minnesota, a former ACORN employee was found to have voter registration forms in his trunk. The forms had not been turned in within 10 days of being signed, as the law requires. Steven Kest, ACORN’s executive director, says that particular former employee did the wrong thing. But as soon as the national organization found it, it took steps to correct it.
Mr. STEVEN KEST (Executive Director, ACORN): We’ve had probably over 4,000 people working, doing voter registration for us and, you know, there’s a few bad apples. But on the whole, this has been, you know, a hugely successful drive in bringing new voters into the process. […]
4) Dayton Daily News, October 20, 2004, Wednesday, GOP charges voter fraud in Ohio, BYLINE: By Tom Beyerlein.
[…] Party officials recapped a list of allegations of voter registration fraud by canvassers working for private organizations in traditionally Democratic precincts, mostly in northern Ohio and Franklin and Hamilton counties. Among them: the attempted registration of a dead man in Cuyahoga County and Monday’s arrest in Defiance County of a man accused of falsifying 130 registration cards with names like Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins in exchange for crack cocaine. […]
Leaders of massive Ohio voter-registration drives said there’s no evidence of systemic voter fraud in the state.
“What this is really about is that we have hundreds of thousands of new voters in the state of Ohio and the Republican Party is terrified these people are going to come out and vote,” said Jess Goode of America Coming Together, or ACT, one of the canvassing groups lambasted by the Republicans. “The truth is, the Republican Party is undertaking the largest voter-suppression effort ever undertaken in Ohio.” […]
Bennett said groups like ACT and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, have done registration work that is “sloppy, haphazard and, in some cases, downright illegal” in a bid to defeat President Bush. [...]
5) Dayton Daily News (Ohio), October 20, 2004 Wednesday CITY EDITION, GOP CHARGES VOTER FRAUD; Surge in registrations leads to charges, criticism, BYLINE: Tom Beyerlein.
This is a shorter version of #1.
6) The Washington Times, October 21, 2004 Thursday, Racicot asks Kerry to fight voter fraud, BYLINE: By Jerry Seper, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, SECTION: NATION; Pg. A04.
[…] In Ohio, Mr. Gillespie denounced “some of the most alarming” reports of voter fraud in the country, including the attempted registration of a dead man and the arrest of another man accused of falsifying 130 registration cards with names such as Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins in exchange for crack cocaine.
John Williams, director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections in Ohio, said his office was concerned that cards sent to newly registered voters in the county directing them to their nearest polling place were returned because the people or the addresses could not be found.
Mr. Williams said that although the number was large, it did not mean every one of them represented a fraudulent voter registration, although an inquiry is under way. Officials have focused on 35 questionable registrations submitted by a worker for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, he said.
An ACORN official said yesterday that the organization hired 4,000 to 5,000 volunteers in a voter-registration drive that netted 1.1 million applications and that from “time to time, some of the workers did not live up to quality-control standards.” But, the official said, ACORN is cooperating with authorities in the probe. […]
7) Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio), October 21, 2004 Thursday 1 STAR EDITION, PARTIES PREPARE HUGE EFFORTS TO GET OUT VOTE, BYLINE: Lisa A. Abraham, Beacon Journal staff writer, SECTION: METRO; Pg. A1
[…] Republicans say the Democrats can’t complain about corruption when their voter registration campaign was fraught with fraudulent registrations.
“Is that the same party that’s giving crack cocaine to people for getting illegal registrations? And they want to talk about us doing illegal things?” said Summit County GOP Chairman Alex Arshinkoff.
Arshinkoff was referring to an incident this week in Defiance, where a man admitted he was offered payment in cash or crack cocaine for submitting voter registration cards. The man told authorities he submitted 130 fraudulent cards, including ones in the names of Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins and Michael Jordan. […]
Those groups — America Coming Together, Bring Ohio Back, MoveOnPAC, and ACORN — led the voter registration push in Ohio. […]
8) Investor’s Business Daily, October 22, 2004 Friday, One Lawyer, One Vote, SECTION: SECTION ISSUES & INSIGHTS; EDITORIALS; NATIONAL EDITION; Pg. A16.
This is an editorial, as opposed to a hard news story.
[…] Not considered vote fraud, apparently, is the effort of Georgianne Pitts in Defiance County, Ohio. According to The Toledo Blade, she was working on behalf of the NAACP National Voter Fund and admitted giving crack cocaine in lieu of cash to a young worker who supplied her with completed voter registration forms.
In the swing state of Florida, the activist group Acorn claims to have registered 212,000 voters for the general election. One of them was former St. Petersburg Mayor Charles Schuh who, on receipt of a letter saying his form hadn’t been submitted in time, discovered someone from Acorn had fraudulently submitted his name. […]
9) The Washington Times, October 23, 2004 Saturday, Florida probes activists’ voter-registration effort, BYLINE: By Jerry Seper, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, SECTION: PAGE ONE; Pg. A01.
[…] Amid accusations that voter registration applications have been switched, duplicated, destroyed, forged and otherwise improperly obtained, the investigation has centered, in part, on petition and registration efforts by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
ACORN, which claims to have registered 1.1 million new voters nationwide since July 2003, has actively been collecting signatures on petitions for a constitutional amendment to raise the state’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour. That proposal, now on the Nov. 2 ballot, is expected to boost turnout among 300,000 poor and blue-collar voters in the state , who would be expected to support Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts rather than Mr. Bush. […]
ACORN claims to have registered 212,000 new voters in Florida for the Nov. 2 elections. An ACORN offshoot, known as Floridians for All, a political action committee, says it has collected signed petitions from nearly 1 million people in the state to increase the minimum wage. […]
The department, in a statement, also said workers for ACORN “have been connected with the widespread voter irregularities,” noting that ACORN workers and their voter registration efforts also are under investigation in several states, including Colorado and Ohio. […]
ACORN employees reportedly were paid $2 for each voter registration card they collected. […]
FDLE officials said regional task forces have been created to address voter safety issues and they have focused their investigative efforts on groups “such as ACORN, to identify those persons responsible for illegally hiring workers to obtain fraudulent voter registrations or absentee ballots as well as those workers who are suspected of falsifying thousands of voter applications.” […]
ACORN’s chief Florida organizer, Brian Kettenring, said that, while the group registered thousands of Florida voters, he denied the organization used fraudulent methods or deception. He said the FDLE “appears to be back in the voter-intimidation business” - a reference to accusations made by Democrats during the 2000 presidential election, which proved to be untrue. […]
* Ohio, where election officials are reviewing the voter registration of Jive Turkey Sr., who was among 1,284 suspicious applications that Cuyahoga County, Ohio, election officials will turn over to prosecutors to investigate for potential fraud.
Earlier this week, officials in Defiance County, Ohio, questioned the voter registration applications of Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins and Michael Jordan, obtained by a man who police said was paid in crack cocaine for his registration efforts. […]
10) The Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), October 24, 2004 Sunday ALL EDITION, STEALING THE ELECTION?, SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A04.
Another editorial.
[…] It’s particularly distressing that much of the fraud is linked to civil rights groups: the Lowery Institute in Atlanta; ACORN, a welfare rights group, in Florida; the NAACP in several states - the most notorious being Ohio where a woman NAACP worker paid a man in crack cocaine to turn in fake registrations. How are civil rights aided by election cheating? […]
11) Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2004 Tuesday, Home Edition, THE RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE; Partisan Suspicions Run High in Swing States; Democrats say the GOP aims to disenfranchise the poor and minorities. Republicans counter with claims of voter registration fraud. BYLINE: Peter Wallsten, Ken Silverstein and Elizabeth Shogren, Times Staff Writers SECTION: MAIN NEWS; National Desk; Part A; Pg. 10.
[…] And last year, temporary workers from a group called the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, were found to have submitted hundreds of voter applications with invalid names. […]
One example, they said, was the case of 22-year-old Chad Staton of Defiance, Ohio, who was arrested for filling out more than 100 fictitious registration forms, according to the Defiance County Sheriff’s Office. Staton said he was paid for the registration forms with crack cocaine. […]
12) Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL), October 27, 2004 Wednesday Palm Beach Edition, 180 REGISTRATION FORMS SURFACE IN SOUTH FLORIDA, BYLINE: Brittany Wallman and Alva James-Johnson Staff Writers, Staff Writer Ruth Morris contributed to this report. SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 4B.
[…]A box containing almost 180 voter registrations filled out in the Miami area in July and August surfaced on Tuesday, leading to more questions for a group that allegedly sponsored the registrations.
The forms were turned in to a Fort Lauderdale attorney by Mac William Stuart, a convicted felon and former employee of the voter-registration group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced last week that it was conducting a statewide investigation of ACORN’s voter drive.
ACORN has been accused of mishandling voter registration in its Project Vote, a national effort to get low- and moderate-income and minority voters on the rolls.
Brian Kettenring, head organizer for ACORN in Miami, said Stuart had been fired Aug. 5 for breaking laws against paying people for signing up voters. Kettenring blamed Stuart for the pile of unfiled forms.
“We have no idea who produced those voter registration cards,” he said, “but what we do know is Mac Stuart has them, Mac Stuart was fired by us for breaking the law, and Mac Stuart is a convicted felon.”
According to records from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Stuart was convicted of larceny, robbery and cocaine possession. He was sentenced to prison in 1996 for robbery and served five years in prison.
“I changed my life,” said Stuart. “…Why’d they hire me then? They hired me, promoted me, made me a director. ACORN was supposed to give people a chance.”
Stuart said Tuesday that a friend of his at the Miami ACORN office called him and gave him the box. Stuart turned the box over to his attorney, Fort Lauderdale attorney Stuart Rosenfeldt. Rosenfeldt said he is considering his legal options. […]
Kettenring downplayed the criticism of his group, saying ACORN is victim of “an organized effort by Republicans to manufacture a crisis around voter fraud so they can suppress the black vote.” […]
13) Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL), October 27, 2004 Wednesday Broward Metro Edition, FILLED-IN VOTER FORMS SURFACE; REGISTRATION GROUP UNDER INVESTIGATION; EX-WORKER HANDS BOX TO LAWYER, BYLINE: Brittany Wallman and Alva James-Johnson Staff Writers, Staff Writer Ruth Morris contributed to this report. SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 1B.
This is a later version of #12.
14) ABC News Transcripts, October 29, 2004 Friday, SHOW: NIGHTLINE (11:35 PM ET) – ABC, NIGHTLINE VOTE 2004.
[…] (Off Camera) Four years ago, a contested election in Florida, hanging chads, butterfly ballots and battalions of lawyers arguing all the way to the US Supreme Court. As “Nightline” correspondent Chris Bury now reports, this year, both sides are getting ready for a repeat. And not just in Florida.
CHRIS BURY, ABC NEWS
(Off Camera) In states like Ohio, where the Presidential race now appears to be a dead heat, the lawyers are already descending like crows to a corn field. Here in Columbus, the state capital, hundreds of attorneys, Democrats and Republicans alike, are poised to pounce at the first sign of voting trouble. In fact, an intense legal battle is already under way across this entire state.
CHRIS BURY
(Voice Over) This week in Cleveland, the activist group Acorn confronted election officials, protesting Republican challenges of thousands of voter registrations. […]
CHRIS BURY
(Voice Over) Ohio Republicans are playing up reports of fraud in newspaper ads like this. Including the story of one canvasser accused of registering phony names in exchange for crack cocaine. And voters without legitimate addresses. […]
15) National Review, October 31, 2004, Sunday, ACORN & the Money Tree, BYLINE: By Meghan Clyne, SECTION: National Review Online.
I had to chop this down because it is a long article that mentions ACORN over and over again, but you can read the whole article here.
Reports of voter-registration fraud are tiresomely commonplace. From the 6,000 ineligible felons listed on Colorado’s voter rolls, to the cocaine offered in exchange for registrations from Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy in Ohio, this year’s swing states have already seen unprecedentedly corrupt get-out-the-vote efforts.
This is especially true in Florida, where the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is the subject of a state investigation for potentially criminal voter-registration activity.
THE MONEY TREE Although ACORN’s projects run a wide gamut […] Most of these programs are conducted locally, by state-level ACORN organizations–which are often set up as 501(c)3 nonprofit entities distinct from the national ACORN umbrella, a 501(c)4 lobbying organization. Sounds benign enough–except that, according to Bob Huberty, executive vice president of the Capital Research Center, these tax-exempt 501(c)3s “have no reason for existence other than to get grants from the government and foundations.” They are, essentially, an ACORN front for asking Uncle Sam to subsidize political activity.
Ask ACORN does–and it definitely receives. Take, for example, the most recent tax information from one of ACORN’s subsidiary nonprofits: the ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc., […]
The nominal purpose of those millions is to “provide low rent housing & loan counseling services to low income individuals.” But if the government is funding the actual, legitimate work of ACORN at the local 501(c)3 level, it means that the national lobbying organization can dedicate more of its unrestricted resources to electioneering. […] According to an EPI study, when the ACORN Housing Corp. applied for the grant, they denied any connections to the main ACORN lobbying group (the grant is not for political advocacy). But the AmeriCorps inspector general discovered that “not only was AHC created by ACORN, engaged in numerous transactions with one another, and sharing staff and office space–but it utilized the AmeriCorps grant to increase ACORN membership, a violation of federal guidelines.” (ACORN charges membership dues, much as labor unions do; thus, by exploiting AmeriCorps funding to inflate its membership rolls, ACORN used government resources to bring in even more money–money with no restrictions on its political use.)
A SHADY PAST . . . Given that federal funding is used “flexibly” within the ACORN empire, what kind of return is the government getting on its investment? […] (ACORN’s in-house union-busting starkly contradicts its prescriptions for private-sector unionization, and is especially two-faced considering that ACORN’s chief organizer and co-founder–Wade Rathke–is also the chief organizer of Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union in New Orleans.)
ACORN’s hypocrisy also extends to its stand on the minimum wage. […] ACORN tried to exempt itself from California’s minimum-wage requirements. […]
. . . AND A DARKER PRESENT Fittingly, wage increases are the centerpiece of ACORN’s current woes. […]
According to Wilson, some petition forms were fraudulently post-dated by ACORN workers; he adds, however, that “they didn’t even have to post-date them–handing them in late did the trick in making it look like they belonged to people who were properly registered.”
Florida ACORN also registered thousands of felons–who, under Florida law, are ineligible to vote. […]
Stuart claims that Florida ACORN paid workers $2 for each voter registration they collected, and claims he has receipts to prove it. […]
At the end of each week, he claims, “you made copies of the voter-registration forms–which was illegal. Once a form is signed, it’s illegal to make copies of it… From there, we’d send the copies to Project Vote [a national ACORN voter-registration arm, and yet another sub-group] in Brooklyn, and then Project Vote would send it to America’s Families United [an independent 527 organization in Washington, D.C.].” In turn, AFU would send money back to Project Vote […]
“Project Vote would send me e-mails,” claims Stuart, […]
[…]Hundreds of thousands of dollars from national left-leaning organizations, and the attentions of the House Minority Leader, seem out of place for an ordinary state ballot initiative–out of place, that is, until you realize that Floridians For All and Florida ACORN do not consider the minimum wage their main priority. […]
In the course of its crusade to defeat the president and establish a Democratic stronghold, ACORN faces remarkable allegations: […]
And–if it’s all true–that’s just in Florida, itself only a small part of ACORN’s antics nationwide.
16) Newsday (New York), October 31, 2004 Sunday, ALL EDITIONS, COMPLICATIONS, CHALLENGES ABOUND;Going nose to nose in Ohio; Of the states up for grabs, it is among the most hotly contested, with both parties taking pre-emptive actions; BYLINE: BY JOHN RILEY. STAFF CORRESPONDENT;SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A37.
[…] Based on anecdotes from around the state, however, Republicans argue that many new registrations - largely gathered by outside groups such as America Coming Together, ACORN and an NAACP affiliate - may be phony. Among the more celebrated examples, officials in Cuyahoga County, a Cleveland-centered Democratic stronghold, flagged one in the name of “Jive Turkey Sr.” among 1,200 suspicious registrations, and officials in Defiance County identified about 100, including names such as Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy.
Defiance Sheriff David Westrick traced the 100 to one man, Chad Staton, and has charged in a criminal complaint that Staton was being paid $1 per registration in crack cocaine by a Toledo woman, who in turn was being paid $2 per registration by a pro-Democrat group. “We’ve never had anything like this before,” Westrick said. […]
17) Fox News Network, November 1, 2004 Monday, SHOW: FOX HANNITY & COLMES 9:31 PM EST, Interview With Karl Rove, BYLINE: Sean Hannity; Alan Colmes, GUESTS: Karl Rove, SECTION: NEWS; Domestic.
[…] ROVE: Well, that’s one of the things that the local party did in Ohio and elsewhere. But also, there are multiple registrations on the rolls. There are felons who are ineligible to vote who are registered on the rolls.
Remember, Ohio is the place where we had this example in Defiance County of the worker for the NAACP voter fraud project, who’s alleged to have registered 100 illegitimate names, including himself 22 times on the voter roll. And he says that he was paid for his work in crack cocaine, allegedly, and his supervisor has said yes, she did pay him in crack cocaine. […]
ROVE: Well, you remember, Congressman Weldon apparently was holding a news conference in front of a prison when a bunch of workers from ACORN emerged carrying absentee ballots. In the state of Pennsylvania, you cannot give your absentee ballot to someone else to deliver for you. You have to put it in the mail yourself, and here were a bunch of workers for a very highly partisan group carrying a bunch of prisoner ballots out of the prison illegally and attempting to vote them. […]
18) World Magazine, November 6, 2004, Litigation nation, BYLINE: The Editors, SECTION: QUICK TAKES Vol. 19, No. 43.
This is an editorial.
[…] Authorities in two Ohio counties are investigating 1,000 possible false voter registrations. The suspicious forms included the registration of a man who has been dead for more than two decades and an elderly woman who is incapable of signing her name. In another Ohio case, a man was paid with crack cocaine for filing false voter registration forms-some which registered Disney character Mary Poppins and singer Michael Jackson. […]
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) fell into the limelight after reports that the Democrat-affiliated 527 group submitted thousands of possibly fraudulent voter registrations in the presidential swing states of Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. […]
Bonus article!) The Wall Street Journal, whose articles are not archived by Nexis, also took a crack at the story. Referring to the incidents in 2004, the WSJ published this report.
The WSJ, of course, is home to one of America’s leading electoral fraud experts, John Fund, author of Stealing Elections. (The recently published edition of the book relies on Capital Research Center’s research, specifically, our profile of Barack Obama in the June edition of Foundation Watch.)
It could be argued that community organizers don’t use cocaine as payment any more. After all, that’s so 2004.
Look at a story that ran in the New York Post on Oct. 10:
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. […]
In fairness, at least ACORN appears to have reformed somewhat. It now uses cigarettes and plain old cash in its vote fraud campaigns.
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November 1st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
[...] http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/?p=2190 [...]
March 19th, 2009 at 9:14 am
[...] Is reported to have exchanged drugs for voter registrations. [...]