Lou Dobbs: Voter Fraud and the Obama Connection

[_dartagnan]

This guy is my favorite guy over at CNN.

If anyone at CNN would provide an impartial coverage of Obama's "obscene and outrageous" connection to ACORN, it would be Dobbs. What follows is a transcript from last night's show. It is just amazing how democrats are trying to steal this election and nobody is doing much about it. He catches Obama in lies about his connections to it as well.

DOBBS: New evidence tonight that the so-called community left- wing activist group ACORN is involved in widespread voter registration fraud. And point of fact, ACORN is a left-wing special interest group that's been under investigation for, literally, years in various parts of the country for voter fraud and embezzlement.

Tonight, the Lake County, Indiana Board of Election says ACORN submitted literally thousands of fraudulent voter registrations cards over the past few days alone.

Drew Griffin has been investigating ACORN. He's joining us now from Chicago bureau with the very latest for us -- Drew?

DREW GRIFFIN, CNN SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS UNIT: Lou, let me set this up a little bit. Lake County is a very Democratic county in the Republican state of Indiana. Barack Obama wants to turn Indiana this election. And if it turns his way it will be largely because of the voters in Lake County who turn out again heavily Democratic.

ACORN who supports Barack Obama in this presidential campaign went out and tried to register as many new voters in Lake County as they possibly could. The deadline was October 6th. They came in with 5,000 new applications. And when the registrations office began going through them, they found a pattern -- every single one of them was fraudulent.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GRIFFIN (on camera): A lot of them?

RUTHANN HOAGLAND (R), LAKE COUNTY ELECTIONS BOARD: 50 percent. We had close to 5,000 total from ACORN, and so far, we have identified about 2100.

GRIFFIN: So roughly half of them...

HOAGLAND: Roughly half.

GRIFFIN: ... are bad.

HOAGLAND: Correct.

GRIFFIN: Registered to a dead person, registered to a person who lives at a fast food shop?

HOAGLAND: Yes.

GRIFFIN: Shop?

HOAGLAND: Yes.

GRIFFIN: Or just all of them, amazingly, in the same hand?

HOAGLAND: Yes. Yes. All the signatures look exactly the same. Everything on the card filled out looks just the same.

GRIFFIN: Ruthann, fraud?

HOAGLAND: We have no idea what the motive behind it is. It's just overwhelming to us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GRIFFIN: Lou, I took a look at these registration forms and, indeed, they're all in the same hand. You can tell they're all written by the same person. They showed us the death certificates of some of these people who are registered there.

The workers have been diligently trying to go through all these new ones. But finally, they had to just put them aside. 2,100 of these applications are fraudulent. The other 2900 have been placed to the side. They haven't even looked at them yet.

They want to take care of the actual good applications of real new voters who really want to vote in this election. But they're scared. They're scared they don't know what's out there and who or what is going to show up at the polls when voting actually begins in the ballot boxes.

DOBBS: Drew, the -- woman with whom you were speaking, a terrific public servant, I -- we have got wonderful people like her all over the country. She seemed very sweet, she would not commit to the fact that somebody writing in the same handwriting for thousands of times to register dead people would be committing fraud.

But listen, you've been looking into this story for days and days now. We're seeing it from Vegas to Ohio to Pennsylvania to Indiana, all over the country, and these investigations are opening up. How can there be any doubt about what's at work here?

GRIFFIN: You know, each individual county, Lou -- and that's what's happening there. And let me tell you, Lake County, they are so afraid of anybody calling them partisan, for every worker, every job in that elections office, one person is a Republican, one is a Democrat.

Both Republicans and Democrats are coming to me and saying, look, this is fraud. This is registration fraud. But each county has to look at it and usually what happens is, after the fact, after the election, the boards look at it, they file criminal charges, people are charged with these.

But it takes years to get these charged filed and for any kind of actual convictions to come through.

DOBBS: Where is...

GRIFFIN: And that's too late.

DOBBS: Where is the Justice Department? And why is this being permitted to go on?

GRIFFIN: I think that's a very good question but I will ask the Justice Department tomorrow morning.

But, again, if the jurisdiction of the local county that has to go through the legal process, you know, so that's what this board will recommend, a decision to the county attorney.

DOBBS: All right. Drew, thank you very much, as always, outstanding reporting.

Well, new evidence tonight that the Obama campaign is substantially connected to ACORN, despite disavows from both ACORN and the Obama campaign. And new questions tonight as well about just how much money ACORN receives from the federal government.

As Bill Tucker reports some members of Congress are now calling for all federal funding of any part of ACORN to be halted.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): House Republican leader John Boehner wants all federal funding to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, to end it now. He's joining a course of Republican members who are furious over repeated charges of voter registration fraud against ACORN.

Last month, 39 members of the House sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking the attorney general to investigate ACORN.

REP. TOM FEENEY (R), FLORIDA: We shouldn't be funding any political activity with taxpayer dollars. Jefferson said it was the essence of tyranny to force a man to contribute to a cause he doesn't believe in.

TUCKER: But when it comes to cutting off funding, there's a problem. Nobody has a handle on how much money ACORN receives from federal resources.

REP. STEVE GARRETT (R), NEW JERSEY: I would absolutely say, no, we do not have a handle on that. And the reason is -- as I said a moment ago, ACORN is an umbrella organization of 75 different organization, as I understand it, and so they have, if you want to use the word "tentacles," out in all of these. And in any piece of legislation, you will probably not see the word ACORN in it.

TUCKER: Representative Garrett says that within the federal rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, there's a $500 million set aside for community organizations like the groups that make up ACORN.

Financial Services Committee chairman, Barney Franks, says no money goes to ACORN. And a spokesman for ACORN says it receives no money from federal sources, calling itself, a, quote, "nonprofit, nonpartisan social justice organization," which refuses to accept federal moneys, saying funding comes from donations and membership fees.

Opponents call that laughable, claiming that at least 40 percent of ACORN's funding is supplied by federal sources.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TUCKER: And ACORN has been paid $800,000 by the Obama campaign to register voters. And there's another connection between ACORN and the Democratic presidential candidate Obama. Obama, along with the Department of Justice, represented the group in a lawsuit to force the state of Illinois to comply with voter registration law, Lou.

DOBBS: So, to -- again, to be clear, there is no question that the Obama campaign is paying ACORN...

TUCKER: That's correct.

DOBBS: ... for voter registration? And that now that ACORN is being with fraudulent registration, voter fraud, in effect, across a number of states all across the country?

TUCKER: That is absolutely correct.

DOBBS: And there is no federal investigation at this point? This is absolutely obscene and outrageous.

Bill, thank you very much. Bill Tucker.

Well, ACORN is under investigation for embezzlement and voter fraud among other things in at least eight states. Authorities are investigating ACORN's voter registration drives. And ACORN employees, some of them have been convicted of voter fraud.

Former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell is calling for closer scrutiny of Senator Obama's connections to ACORN.

The Obama campaign Web site, by the way, fight the smears responded today by attacking Blackwell, saying, quote, "Blackwell's attacks against ACORN and community organizers constitute a vile Republican pattern of mockery and viciousness against this noble profession.

Community organizers are the very individuals Republicans should be celebrating for helping people help themselves rather than depending on the government."

That gets a little complicated since ACORN is depending on, obviously, the government and political organizations. And after disavowing a relationship with ACORN, despite all of those investigations across eight states right now into ACORN and voter fraud, the Obama campaign, obviously, supporting ACORN.

That brings us to the subject of our poll tonight. Are you concerned that radical left-wing activist groups are trying to manipulate the outcome of this presidential election? Yes or no. Cast your vote at Loudobbs.com. We'll have the results for you here later.

[_ajax18]

You know sometimes I wonder about fraud. I mean, people that work the polls probably have pretty strong political opinions. I sent my voter registration requiest into rock the vote a month and a half ago and nothing back as of yet. I'm not sure how or if I want to put more effort into it.

Considering the fact that I personally am ready to go to war with the left and the fact that I can't leave my car unlocked or go out at night in this town, voter fraud doesn't seem to far fetched. In fact, I don't see how they could ever really eliminate it.

[_bcspace]

What follows is a transcript from last night's show. It is just amazing how democrats are trying to steal this election and nobody is doing much about it. He catches Obama in lies about his connections to it as well.

Too bad he doesn't get to say this in Prime Time.

[_richardMdBorn]

My wife had a job investigating voter fraud in Illinois for three months in 2006. She expected it to be bad, but it exceeded her worst nightmares. Too many Illinois Republicans are more interested in feeding off the scraps given them by the Democrats than in fighting corruption.

[_Doctor Steuss]

Voter fraud is no joke, and this has caused me to take a pause and re-examine whether or not I want to be casting a ballot for Obama. The problem is that if I hold this against the Democrats, I must (in order to avoid hypocrisy) hold the many Democratic voter registration cards that were tossed into the garbage by GOP workers in Nevada against McCain.

More and more, this election is turning into 2004 where I won’t be voting for someone, but instead against someone. That is one of the strange things about how I voted in 2004. I can’t gloat and hold it over the heads of all of the idiots who voted for Bush a second time. I can’t joke along with my friends that such people should have their voting privileges revoked this election because I don’t know if Kerry would have done any better (a very large portion of me doesn’t believe he would have… it was more-or-less a crap shoot).

ACORN workers have engaged in a despicable act (one that fortunately was caught this time [coincidently, it was ACORN itself who brought the fraud to the attention of election officials long before search warrants were served]). Not only was it caught, but luckily Terrell Owens and Tony Romo wouldn’t be able to show up on election day to cast their ballots in Nevada, so it appears that the individuals of ACORN that were responsible for this were either idiots (knowing their form of fraud wouldn’t sway the outcome other than public opinion if it were discovered), or were trying to make a bit of cash by scamming the system.

Hopefully their next act of voter fraud won’t be the same as that carried out by the RNC not too long ago in political history. Those types of shenanigans can effect the outcome of an election directly, and can leave voters jaded when they arrive to cast their ballot only to find that workers for the RNC threw their registration card in the garbage instead of submitting it to the county.

I’m gradually beginning to wonder if I’d be better off in Canada.

[Alf'Omega]

Voter fraud is no joke, and this has caused me to take a pause and re-examine whether or not I want to be casting a ballot for Obama.

You're right that it is no joke, but the thing that strikes me as odd in this whole thing is, how is a nonexistent/dead person going to vote once registered? You called it an idiotic strategy, and I agree (although we don't really know for sure the real motivation behind these fraudulent registrations; the folks who are receivng these registrations certainly don't).

It makes me wonder if the folks doing it are really democrats at all. Let's face it; it sure would be a brilliant move on the part of a few republicans to join ACORN and engage in the fraud to cast doubt on what is considered a left wing organization by outsiders. I mean, the fraudulent registrations seem almost too obvious.

Makes me pause, anyway. I'm not claiming this is the case; just that the whole thing is so damn strange, it's difficult to know what to think about it without jumping to baseless conclusions.

The fact is, however, that until Obama is actually linked to the fraud itself with hard evidence (as opposed to drawing conclusions from his campaign having made a large donation), you can't assume he personally had anything to do with it. Innocent until proven guilty, right?

[_Some Schmo]

Duplicate.

(no, this is not fraud).

[_Doctor Steuss]

[…] Innocent until proven guilty, right?

And this would be one of the reasons I usually wait until the last minute to vote. One never knows what might seep through the cracks of the political anus as the taint of American claps on.

<--- Trying my best to suspend judgment for both sides of the fence… although failing miserably a good portion of the time.

[_richardMdBorn]

Voter fraud is no joke, and this has caused me to take a pause and re-examine whether or not I want to be casting a ballot for Obama.

You're right that it is no joke, but the thing that strikes me as odd in this whole thing is, how is a nonexistent/dead person going to vote once registered? You called it an idiotic strategy, and I agree (although we don't really know for sure the real motivation behind these fraudulent registrations; the folks who are receivng these registrations certainly don't).

It makes me wonder if the folks doing it are really democrats at all. Let's face it; it sure would be a brilliant move on the part of a few republicans to join ACORN and engage in the fraud to cast doubt on what is considered a left wing organization by outsiders. I mean, the fraudulent registrations seem almost too obvious.

Makes me pause, anyway. I'm not claiming this is the case; just that the whole thing is so damn strange, it's difficult to know what to think about it without jumping to baseless conclusions.

The fact is, however, that until Obama is actually linked to the fraud itself with hard evidence (as opposed to drawing conclusions from his campaign having made a large donation), you can't assume he personally had anything to do with it. Innocent until proven guilty, right?

My wife found a number of democratic areas in Chicago where more than 100% of the residents voted. If there are no Republican judges present, what's to keep the Democrats from voting in the names of the dead or non-existent people. Also, Democrats have fought against requiring IDs for voting which also facilitates voter fraud.

[_EAllusion]

In Wisconsin, the tendency is for Democrats to engage in voter fraud by providing cheap bribes in exchange for votes to the poor, like the infamous cigarettes to the homeless fiasco in 2000 for Gore. Usually a few are caught, suggesting many more are not. The Republicans counter this by widespread voter suppression tactics, such as going to minority polling locations and challenging every vote possible in order to create long lines to discourage voters. And yet, we're a relatively clean state. Ah, democracy. On the plus side, for all the evil, this is only prevalent enough to swing elections at the margins. On the down side, Wisconsin was at the margins the last two presidential elections. Not this year, methinks.

With all that said, my understanding of this matter is similar to this post from Ed Brayton:

I'm going to cut and paste a factsheet that ACORN has put out about the allegations of voter fraud. Let me say up front that every statement made here was confirmed by my investigation of the group for the article I wrote at the Michigan Messenger, not just by ACORN but by independent and non-partisan voter rights experts.

Key Facts:

1. In order to help 1.3 million people register to vote, we hired more than 13,000 registration assistance workers. As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift.

2. Any large voter registration operation will have a small percentage of workers who turn in bogus registration forms. Their goal clearly is not to cast a fraudulent vote. It is simply to defraud their employer, ACORN, by getting a paycheck without earning it. ACORN is the victim of this fraud - not the perpetrator.

3. In nearly every case that has been reported, it was ACORN that discovered the bad forms, and called them to the attention of election authorities, putting the forms in a package that identified them in writing as suspicious, encouraging election officials to investigate, and offering to help with prosecutions. We are required by law to turn in all forms, but instead of just turning them in and figuring that it is the responsibility of the board of elections to figure out which are valid, we spend millions of dollars verifying that forms are valid, and then separate out those that are suspicious.

4. This has nothing to do with "voter fraud" - nothing at all to do with anyone trying to cast an extra vote. There has never been a single reported instance in which bogus registration forms have led to anyone voting improperly. To do that, they would have to show up at the polls, prove their identity as all first-time registrants must, and risk jail. The people who turned in these forms did so not because they wanted an extra vote, but because they didn't care enough to make sure eligible people got to vote at all.

5. When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. But for some reason, when ACORN turns voter registration workers over to the authorities for filling out bogus forms, it gets accused of "voter fraud." This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, these charges are outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated.

6. Similar attacks were launched against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. The bogus charges were at the heart of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal that led to the resignations of Karl Rove, Attorney General Ablerto Gonzales and other top Justice Department Officials. It turned out that it was the charges that were fraudulent, and that they were part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression. Republican US Attorneys David Iglesias (NM), Todd Graves (MO), and John McKay (Washington) all were fired primarily because they refused to prosecute similar bogus charges of "voter fraud." Another US Attorney, Bradley Schlozman, who did politicize prosecutions against former ACORN canvassers, was forced to acknowledge under cross examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee that ACORN was the victim of fraud by its employees and ACORN had caught the employees and had identified them to law enforcement.

7. The goals of the people orchestrating these attacks are to distract ACORN from helping people vote and to justify massive voter suppression. That's the real voter fraud; the noise about a small fraction of the forms ACORN has turned in is meant to get the press and public take their eyes off the real threat, while those hurling the charges are stealing people's right to vote in broad daylight. They have already tried to prevent Ohio from registering voters at its early voting sites. In Michigan, they planned to use foreclosure notices to challenge thousands of voters. And if this year is like past years, they are preparing to use this so-called voter fraud to justify massive challenges to voters in minority precincts on Election Day.

The Details:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in,. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card . ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

Fact: No criminal charges related to voter registration have ever been brought against ACORN or partner organizations. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes -- evidence which in most cases WE called to the attention of authorities

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN's good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered.

There are four really important facts here. First, that in the very few instances where actual fraud takes place (as opposed to duplicate voter registration applications or applications with portions that are illegible or have mistakes in them), ACORN is the victim of that fraud, not the perpetrator.

Second, that in almost every case where canvassers have turned in fraudulent applications, they were caught because ACORN turned in both the fraudulent card and the identity of the canvasser, and they do so separate from all the applications that they have no reason to believe are bad.

Third, that none of this has anything to do with anyone actually voting twice or anyone being registered to vote that is not a legal voter. When fraud does take place, it's because a canvasser decides to take a short cut rather than do their job and register voters. ACORN fires people for that and turns them in.

Fourth -- and this is very important -- the law requires ACORN to turn in every single registration card that they take, even if it's fraudulent. They cannot, by law, discard ANY voter registration application, they must turn them in to election officials. And bear in mind that they have little means of knowing if someone is turning in a duplicate application because they don't have access to the state's central voter file. If someone who is already registered fills out a card, either because they figure maybe their registration has lapsed and it won't hurt to make sure they're registered or because they feel sorry for a canvasser, by law those cards must be turned in to the county election officials.

We know beyond any doubt that the GOP has an active strategy of trumping up these voter fraud charges against ACORN. How do we know that? Look at the DOJ Inspector General's report on the US Attorneys scandal, especially the section about New Mexico's David Iglesias. Republican political operatives, including Karl Rove himself, put pressure on Iglesias to bring voter fraud charges against ACORN based on a single canvasser who turned in some fraudulent applications in that state.

When he refused to do so because there was no evidence, he was put on the list of attorneys to be fired. The report contains emails and memos from Rove and from Republican activists throwing a fit over the fact that Iglesias - a man who ran for office as a Republican, so he hardly has any reason to be biased in favor of ACORN - would not do their bidding and bring a fraud case against them.

Iglesias had nothing but excellent reviews of his work by his superiors at the DOJ and the excuses that they offered for why they wanted him fired were found by the Inspector General to be dishonest justifications invented later. The evidence reveals that he was targeted because he would not bring a corruption charge against a Democratic official before the 2004 election in order to undermine the Democrats during the campaign (and by the way, charges were eventually brought and the official was acquitted).

This is politics, plain and simple. The GOP cannot come up with a single documented example of someone voting twice or voting fraudulently, but they continually raise the specter of voter fraud in order to cover up their longstanding voter suppression efforts. And those efforts, unlike the allegations of voter fraud, have been documented and proven in court many times. Multiple courts have found the RNC and various Republican state committees guilty of illegal voter suppression and issued injunctions against their voter caging programs. And that is the sole purpose of these voter fraud allegations, to distract attention away from all of that.