We found the tip of the iceburg

11 accused of faking voter registration cards in Miami-Dade

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By JENNIFER LEBOVICH


[email protected]

Eleven people hired to register potential voters in Miami-Dade County before last year's presidential election were being sought Wednesday for falsifying hundreds of voter registration cards.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office issued arrest warrants for each of the 11 suspects, all of whom worked for the local chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, (ACORN).
By early Wednesday morning, six were in custody, authorities said.
ACORN came under fire during last year's presidential campaign when Republicans and other conservative groups accused the national

organization of committing fraud in its aggressive voter registration efforts in various cities and counties nationwide, including Florida.

But ACORN officials said they had alerted authorities about the alleged illegal activity among some canvassers in Miami-Dade after finding ``numerous discrepancies'' on voter cards collected from the Homestead area.

The arrests are ``further evidence we've been policing our own folks and report people attempting to commit voter registration fraud,'' said ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring. ``This was really some individuals who were trying to defraud their employer.''

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle praised ACORN.
``We've been very aggressive about a lot of these cases,'' she said. ``But we would not have known about these workers unless ACORN brought it to us.

``It's really minor, ineffectual attempts to justify getting paid an hourly basis. It could not have impacted the voting process whatsoever. Nonetheless, we cannot turn a blind eye to this,'' Rundle added.

ACORN quality control workers found the discrepancies in the cards turned in by 10 canvassers and contacted authorities in June 2008, authorities said. The group turned in 1,400 cards, of which 888 were found to be fraudulent.

An analyst with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement later reviewed a random group of cards, searching databases to find a record of the voter.

The majority of those sampled ``contained registrant information that was not able to be matched to a living person,'' the warrant said.
The workers, who were paid between $8 and $10 an hour, registered names of nonexistent people -- in one case, Paul Newman and James Taylor appeared on cards -- or simply filled out several cards for the same real voter, authorities said.

Those arrested are charged with several counts of false swearing in connection with voting or elections and submission of false voter registration information, both third-degree felonies.

Miami Herald staff writer David Ovalle contributed to this report.

if it really could not affect the voting process whatsoever , why even do it?

NoDrama said:

if it really could not affect the voting process whatsoever , why even do it?

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Because if they didn't turn in any voter registrations, they didn't get PAID. It wasn't some huge voter registration scam, it was just some dishonest people who worked for ACORN who wanted to get paid for not working so they falsified registration applications.

They weren't registering any actual people to vote, just making up names and filling out the applications themselves. Nobody voted who wasn't supposed to, because the applications were completely fictional.

Oh yeah, ACORN is a model all organizations should follow.

Wasn't Obama somehow involved with ACORN?

Wasn't Obama somehow involved with ACORN?

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Here you go, this is the actual Obama-Acorn story:

Obama: Burying ACORNs
​

The ad says that "Obama's ties to ACORN run long and deep" – that he "taught classes" for the group, paid a "front" $800,000 for get-out-the-vote efforts, and was endorsed by ACORN for president. That last one's true – ACORN's political action committee did offer an Obama endorsement. It's also true that Obama has worked with the group in the past. In 1995, Obama helped represent ACORN in a successful lawsuit to require the state of Illinois to offer "motor voter" registration at DMV offices. Obama has said that this is his only association with ACORN, but that's not the case – he has had other, though less direct, interactions with the organization.
​

When Obama was on the board of directors of the Woods Fund, the foundation gave grants of $75,000 in 2001 and $70,000 in 2002 to ACORN's Chicago office. The McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee cite an additional grant of $45,000 in 2000. The Woods Fund has not responded to our calls about their 2000 grants.

The Obama campaign also paid Citizens Services Inc., a group affiliated with ACORN, more than $800,000 for get-out-the-vote (not voter registration) efforts during the primary election. The nature of CSI's services was initially misrepresented on the Obama campaign's disclosures to the Federal Election Commission, which the campaign describes as an oversight. The Obama campaign says it has not been involved with ACORN during the general election.
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In addition, after law school, Obama may have had contact with ACORN when he directed a Chicago registration drive for Project Vote in 1992. According to Sanford Newman, who was the program’s national director at the time, ACORN may have been one of dozens of organizations that participated in registration drives that year with Project Vote personnel like Obama. But Project Vote didn’t begin contracting exclusively with ACORN until after Obama worked for the group in 1992. “Working for Project Vote at the time was by no means working for ACORN," Newman told us. ACORN had no influence on Project Vote policy and no representation on its board.​

As for "teaching classes" for the group, the McCain campaign cites a March 2008 Newsday article, which says that ACORN organizer Madeleine Talbot "initially considered Obama a competitor" when both were working to get asbestos insulation removed from a Chicago housing project, but that "she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff." Newsday does not say whether Obama accepted the invitation. An article by Chicago alderman Toni Foulkes says that "we [ACORN] have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year" between 1992 and 2004, when the article was written. The Obama campaign says that Obama participated in two, one-hour trainings in a volunteer capacity. Foulkes could not be reached for comment.

Neither ACORN's Chicago office nor CSI has been accused of voter registration irregularities.​

–by Jess Henig, with Ronald Lampard

Update, Oct. 21: We originally said that Project Vote works closely with ACORN, implying that Obama would have had contact with the group when he directed a voter registration drive for Project Vote in 1992. We have since learned that Project Vote and ACORN may or may not have worked together in Chicago that year. The group didn’t contract with ACORN exclusively back then. We have corrected the story to reflect this.

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Not bad at all, and if you are a lawyer in a city and doing a lot of community outreach to get into political office (which you would have to do if you are not say a Kennedy) you would have to lobby far and wide and work with several different groups and meet with several different people, like the link to Ayers who is a well respected college professor.

And as far as linking through different companies. I can be linked to doing business with almost any company out there, because if I buy a service or good from this company, and it has links to that company, then it is the same as Obama buying some advertisements with this company for 800k and it being linked to Acorn. What is the link, and at what point are things coincidental?

An even bigger problem that this article is the use of computerized voter machines...we should just stick to paper ballots

Screw that, we need to have a central computer database with this like we do with banks.

We should allow every American to go to the Secretary of State to get a pin number and account number set up, and let them vote at home, and print off their vote with a confirmation number and their votes incase some sort of fraud is suspected.

Paper is easy to 'lose'