By Glen Meakem
Published in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review
October 26, 2008

The recent wave of voter fraud charges surrounding the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has reached a level in which ACORN has become a threat to a fair and transparent election, devaluing the basic right to vote of all Americans.

The facts of Sen. Barack Obama’s close association with ACORN and the organization’s explicit support of him mean that a government-funded organization has become a major partisan political force in this election. It seems that Obama supporters will stop at nothing, including manipulating the democratic process itself, to win.

ACORN voter registration drives — called Project Vote — consistently break federal election laws by producing multiple registrations for individuals, registering fictitious or imagined individuals and registering felons, deceased or underage individuals who are not allowed to vote.

In Clark County, Nev., nearly 40 percent of the registrations submitted by ACORN between January and July have been rejected or questioned as fraudulent. Bridgeport, Conn., officials estimate that 20 percent of ACORN’s registrations were faulty. About 33,000 duplicate registration forms have been found in Oakland County, Mich. And in Colorado, ACORN registered numerous individuals 40 separate times.

In 2007, ACORN was fined $25,000 by the state of Washington for committing voter fraud; five separate ACORN employees pleaded guilty to filing phony voter registration forms.

Similarly, in St. Louis, eight ACORN workers pled guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration forms in April 2008.

In 2004, four ACORN workers in Ohio were indicted by a federal grand jury.

In Wisconsin, officials discovered at least seven felons who were employed by ACORN as special registration deputies — a possible violation of Wisconsin law — and a total of 49 ACORN employees have been referred to the district attorney for committing possible voter fraud.

In Pennsylvania, one ACORN worker is facing 19 counts of perjury. The Allegheny County district attorney says additional criminal charges could be filed against individuals for committing voter fraud in the Pittsburgh area.

And this is only a partial list of known abuses.

Barack Obama is inextricably connected to ACORN, an organization that officially endorsed him for president in February. During the primaries, Obama’s campaign paid roughly $800,000 to Citizens Services — an ACORN subsidiary that shares the same board of directors — to conduct get-out-the-vote initiatives. This is the first national campaign to ever hire ACORN.

According to Toni Foulkes, a member of ACORN’s national association board, Obama provided training to ACORN leaders every year from 1993 to 2003.

Obama also helped train the staff of high-ranking ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who proudly boasts of forcing banks to extend subprime mortgage loans to people with questionable credit histories.

ACORN selected and paid Obama for his legal services in 1995 to sue the state of Illinois and compel the implementation of the National Voter Registration Act — also known as the “motor voter” act — which was designed to make it easier for all citizens to register to vote. Motor voter has made it easier to commit voter fraud.

When groups like ACORN commit voter fraud on a massive scale, they are using revolutionary tactics against our system of constitutional governance not dissimilar to tactics used by anti-democratic forces to undermine elected governments during the 20th century.

Worse, up to 40 percent of ACORN’s annual budget comes from the government, supplied in part through the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

Barack Obama must immediately renounce ACORN and its fraudulent tactics. More broadly, Congress should move decisively to defund ACORN. Continued taxpayer funding only enables a substantial weakening of our constitutional rights and the rule of law. ACORN’s assault on voting rights, fair elections and our representative form of government should no longer be tolerated.