Obama Front Group Busted For Voter Registration Fraud In Michigan

The stakes in this election could not be higher. Democrats are frustrated by the red state electoral college majority that has emerged in recent presidential elections. By hook or crook, they are determined to win back the presidency. To this end, we've been told about the millions of new registered voters Democrats have added to the election rolls this year. The group at the forefront of this effort is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a group with which Sen. Barack Obama worked closely as a community organizer and which is now spearheading his voter registration and GOTV efforts. In Michigan, a key battleground state where Obama is struggling against McCain, ACORN has registered 200,000 new voters in recent months. Election officials are only now beginning to uncover massive fraud committed by those "paid workers" of ACORN. The Detroit Free Press reports:

Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.

The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN's Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.

"There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State's Office. "And it appears to be widespread."

Chesney said her office has had discussions with ACORN officials after local clerks reported the questionable applications to the state. Chesney said some of the applications are duplicates and some appear to be names that have been made up. The Secretary of State's Office has turned over several of the applications to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

The U.S. Attorney's Office on Friday declined to confirm whether an investigation was taking place.

In recent years, ACORN's voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Missouri and Washington, with some employees convicted of voter fraud.

ACORN officials said they were looking into the problem.

As the story notes, voter registration fraud is not new to ACORN. At the end of August, Wisconsin election officials announced plans to seek criminal investigations of 37 ACORN employees accused of offering gifts to sign up voters (including prepaid gas cards and restaurant cards) or falsifying driver's license numbers, Social Security numbers or other information on voter registration cards. There are also investigations underway against ACORN in Nevada and Pennsylvania. The mainstream media completely ignored the discovery that Obama's campaign had illegally hidden at least $800,000 in payments to ACORN earlier this year. While Democrats blame their election losses in 2000 and 2004 on GOP vote fraud, the only proven vote fraud in those elections was fraud committed by groups like ACORN with close ties to the Democratic Party. Stanley Kurtz warned us months ago about this hidden weapon Obama has working for him to seize control of our government. As Kurtz wrote for the National Review in May:

This is a story we’ve largely missed. While Obama’s Acorn connection has not gone entirely unreported, its depth, extent, and significance have been poorly understood. Typically, media background pieces note that, on behalf of Acorn, Obama and a team of Chicago attorneys won a 1995 suit forcing the state of Illinois to implement the federal “motor-voter” bill. In fact, Obama’s Acorn connection is far more extensive. In the few stories where Obama’s role as an Acorn “leadership trainer” is noted, or his seats on the boards of foundations that may have supported Acorn are discussed, there is little follow-up. Even these more extensive reports miss many aspects of Obama’s ties to Acorn.

If you were out and about Indianapolis these past few months, you no doubt encountered young voter registration workers affiliated with the Obama campaign who were wearing t-shirts with "ACORN" emblazoned on them. There is good reason to believe that massive voter registration fraud may have taken place right here in Indiana by this group just like what has occurred in Michigan and Wisconsin. Paul Ogden astutely wrote about "No Hoosier Left Unregistered" earlier this month. Indiana has seen its voter registration rolls grow by leaps and bounds this year, mostly attributed to the efforts of Obama's presidential campaign. Studying Indiana's latest voter registration numbers, Ogden discovered that 93% of possible voters in Indiana, 4.4 million, are registered to vote! Ogden attributed the problem to voters being registered at multiple addresses and the rolls being filled with deceased voters. I'm not sure that explains it.

According to the Secretary of State's office, nearly 500,000 new voters have been added to Indiana's voter registration rolls this year. Secretary of State Todd Rokita, against the screaming protests of Indiana Democrats, implemented a statewide voter registration system database (SVRS) to eliminate duplicate registrations and deceased voters. When SVRS was first implemented in 2006, the Secretary of State discovered that as many as one-fourth, or over 1 million, voter registrations in Indiana were invalid. At least 290,000 duplicate registrations were immediately discovered statewide. It is hard to believe the same type of activity taking place in Wisconsin and Michigan isn't taking place here since the same campaign operatives are behind those efforts.

This should be a wake-up call to Secretary of State Todd Rokita and the Indiana Republican Party. You can bet Marion County Clerk Beth White's office won't alert us to such problems. Shortly after Obama became the apparent nominee of the Democratic Party in June, his team immediately relocated the operations of the national party to Chicago. Obama is a product of a corrupt, one-party system in Chicago. Systematic vote fraud by the political machine in Chicago has effectively eliminated any meaningful competition from the Republican Party for more than a half century. If there is one thing Chicago Democrat know how to do, it is stealing elections. We saw the hanky-panky going on in Lake County in this year's Democratic primary. Don't think there aren't plans to steal votes in Indiana. Chicago Democrats wouldn't know how to run a clean election.