The Mighty Oak Was Once a Little Nut--II
The New York Post has the latest on electoral high jinks in Ohio:
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.
The Columbus Dispatch, however, reports that Ohio's voter-registration process is getting some adult supervision:
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is breaking federal law by not giving county elections boards the chance to determine whether new voter registrations are fraudulent, a federal judge ruled [Thursday] evening. . . .
[Judge George] Smith, appointed by President Reagan, said the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires states not only to verify the addresses and other identifying information provided by newly registered voters with the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the federal Social Security Administration, but also to provide counties with the names of new voters whose records did not match.
Brunner's office had been doing the computerized verification, but the GOP argued that Brunner had not made the names available to county elections boards. The judge gave her a week to comply. . . .
Smith specifically cited questionable activity of one group that registered thousands of new Ohio voters: the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. . . .
An ACORN representative is on a Brunner advisory committee, while Republicans say Obama has "strong ties" to ACORN, serving in the past as an attorney and "leadership trainer" for the group.
Brunner is a Democrat, Ohio Republicans having been wiped out in the 2006 election.
Blogger Bob Krumm wonders if there is a danger in all this to Barack Obama's prospects:
We have heard a great deal that black and Democratic voter registration is significantly improved this year. But how much of that is because people like Mr. Barkley [a Domino's pizza deliveryman who says Acorn "hounded" him to register between 10 and 15 times] have registered multiple times? Probably a lot if the Obama campaign and the Democrat Ohio Secretary of State were off in their early voting projections by 400%. If there are many more people like Mr. Barkley and they vote only once, urban turnout may be far lower than increased voter registration numbers would indicate.
By the way, an Associated Press dispatch on a registration-fraud investigation in Missouri contains this description of Acorn:
The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic.
Technically Acorn is a nonpartisan group. But so are the National Rifle Association, National Right to Life, the Heritage Foundation and any number of other conservative-leaning political and policy groups. Does the AP describe them in that way?
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