ACORN employees tell FBI of deliberate election fraud, according to new documents
The radical activist group ACORN “works” for the Democratic Party and deliberately promotes election fraud, ACORN employees told FBI investigators, according to an FBI document dump Wednesday.
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, are FBI investigators’ reports related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., workers from ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate for violation of election laws. All eight employees involved in the scandal later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.
Project Vote is ACORN’s voter registration arm. Project Vote continues to operate despite the reported dissolution of the national structure of ACORN.
The handwritten reports by FBI agents show that ACORN employees reported numerous irregularities in the nonprofit group’s business practices.
One employee told the FBI that ACORN headquarters is “wkg [working] for the Democratic Party.”
According to one report, an ACORN employee said the purpose of “[f]raudulent cards” was “[t]o cause confusion on election day to keep polls open longer,” “[t]o allow people who can’t vote to vote,” and “[t]o allow to vote multiple times.”
Another report quotes an employee saying, “Project Vote will pay them whether cards fake or not – whatever they had to do to get the cards was attitude.” Project Vote pays based on the number of cards and “that’s why they were so reckless,” the report says.
A report quotes an employee saying, “I don’t like our system. I don’t think we should do voter registration.” The report also notes that employees were “[c]onstantly threatened” and that the staff were “instructed on what to say to FBI.”
Another report indicates an employee told the investigator, that ACORN “[t]old employees not to talk to the FBI.” The FBI is “‘trying to intimidate you.’”
“These documents show the need for a national criminal investigation by the Obama Justice Department into ACORN,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch.
“Is Attorney General [Eric] Holder doing nothing because of Obama’s close connections to ACORN and Project Vote? The information in these new documents has national implications that cry out for further investigation,” Fitton said.
President Obama’s ties to ACORN go back to the 1980s.
“ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project,” according to Toni Foulkes, a former member of ACORN’s national board. From 1985 to 1988 Obama ran the Developing Communities Project from an office located in Chicago’s Holy Rosary Church.
Obama later worked for Project Vote, leading a very successful voter registration drive in Chicago in 1992 that helped elect then-Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, Illinois Democrat.
Meanwhile, Politico reports that ACORN isn’t going away – it’s merely changing form.
Ben Smith writes that radical housing activist John Atlas’s new highly sympathetic institutional biography of ACORN, “Seeds of Change,” acknowledges that ACORN’s current rebranding process is aimed at re-constituting ACORN in the not-too-distant future.
Writes Smith, who includes a direct quotation from the book:
But strong local ACORN chapters swiftly regrouped under new names, like the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and New York Communities for Change. Those groups “will retain ACORN’s commitment to building national power and are beginning discussions” about relaunching a national organization some time after November …
The rebranding maneuver was first reported months ago.
Atlas elaborated on ACORN’s plan during a panel discussion Tuesday at the left-wing “America’s Future Now” conference in Washington, D.C.:
The good news is that a lot of people who were involved in ACORN, members and leaders as well as their allies, are organizing in over a dozen states to resurrect ACORN using its model, focusing on the same constituency, learning from ACORN’s strengths as well as its mistakes, so it is happening.
So far ACORN has rebranded in 13 states plus the District of Columbia.
ACORN Housing, which is the ACORN network’s primary vehicle for getting its hands on federal tax dollars, has renamed itself Affordable Housing Centers of America.
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