Rules be damned!

By MICHELLE MALKIN

October 8, 2008 --

SYSTEMIC corruption of our election process continues. Barack Obama and his old friends at ACORN and Project Vote are leading the way. This radical revolution is taking place in your backyard. And as I've reported before, this voter-fraud racket is on your dime.

On Monday, the two groups announced the wrap-up of a 21-state voter-registration drive targeting low-income people and minorities in such battleground states as Ohio, Pennyslvania, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

What's wrong with that? For starters, these two groups are militantly partisan outfits purporting to engage in nonpartisan activity. And their campaign comes amid an avalanche of fresh voter-fraud allegations involving ACORN in many of those same states.

ACORN has helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. It gets 40 percent of its revenues from the taxpayers, with the rest coming from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance.

Lefty lawyer Sandy Newman founded Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, to register voters in welfare offices and unemployment lines with the explicit goal of turning back the Reagan revolution.

The two groups are inextricably linked - and at their nexus is Barack Obama. Despite his denials of any association with the group, Obama's political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda.

As I've noted previously ("ACORN: O's Ugly Ally," June 26), Obama trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN's PAC endorsed him in this year's Democratic primaries back in February.

And Newman hired Obama in 1992 to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The effort's motto: "It's a Power Thing." Today, the Obama campaign's "Vote for Change" registration drive is running in parallel with ACORN/Project Vote, targetting the same sorts of people.

It's an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama's big-government vision. "Our volume," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe bragged of the voter-registration program, "is going to be enormous."

Quantity over quality. That's the ACORN way - and the fraud allegations keep piling up:

* Yesterday, Nevada officials raided ACORN's Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names. Among the bogus monikers: names of former Dallas Cowboys players.

* Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected thousands of registration forms ACORN had turned in from its drives this summer. On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 of the applications were no good - tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen.

In what seems to be ACORN's standard operating procedure, vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from phone books and forged signatures. According to a local paper (the Northwest Indiana and Illionois Times), "Large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style" and "apparently the organization's canvassers broke rules to meet ACORN-set voter registration quotas to get paid." The fake registrants include dead people and underage kids.

* Milwaukee, Wisc., officials last month discovered at least seven felons employed as voter-registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. (State law bans felons from such work.) They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter-registration cards. The state GOP accuses the group of trying to get dead, imprisoned or imaginary people on the voter rolls. Fraud has plagued ACORN's Milwaukee chapter since the last election cycle.

* In Florida, in Orange County alone, ACORN workers turned in multiple, copycat forms for six separate voters over the summer. The Miami Herald reports: "One individual had 21 duplicate applications."

Election officials had flagged ACORN's negligent practices months ago. But it may be too late: In Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, ACORN has signed up 135,000 new voters, nearly 60 percent of them registered as Democrats - a fifth of all new voters in that region.

* In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people got free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling in some prospects. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who said ACORN "told her who to vote for if she wanted a 'better life,' and told her not to worry about jury duty (one of the reasons this homeless woman didn't want to register) because the government probably wouldn't be able to track her down. She was registering with a temporary address."

Holliday interviewed another homeless man targeted by the registration drive who exulted that he was voting for Obama because "I want him to do his thang. You know, do his thug thizzle."

"Thug thizzle" is street slang for performing your trademark move. Obama and ACORN have practiced their thug thizzle together for years: Organizing an ever-expanding community of ineligible and marginal voters to expand the Democrat power base. Rules be damned.