Why ACORN matters

So what's all the fuss about ACORN, and why should it matter to anyone? Well, if you're an American citizen, and you take citizenship seriously, it matters because our electoral process is being compromised.

As recent press reports have shown, ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has been hard at work registering voters in all of the key battleground states for the upcoming election. And, as many of these same reports attest, they're busy being investigated for possible voter fraud.

Thousands of fake and duplicate names have been discovered, fake addresses, and even real people who don't live anywhere near their "new" addresses. Don't believe me? Just ask Tony Romo and the rest of the starting lineup for the Dallas Cowboys if they've recently moved to Nevada.

But it gets better.

For example, there's Indianapolis, which just won the award for most civic minded city in America as a result of having over 105% of its eligible voting population registered to vote no doubt having to do with the fact that many of the recently submitted registration forms were on behalf of dead people, courtesy of ACORN's efforts. In one Indiana county alone (Lake County) officials stopped processing over five-thousand ACORN submitted forms after the first two-thousand turned out to be bogus.

In Ohio, one Cleveland man admitted he was given cash and cigarettes by ACORN activists to register seventy-two times, and over two-hundred thousand newly submitted voter registration forms have names that do not match a driver's license or a Social Security number, as required by state law.

In fact, there are currently ongoing investigations of the group in at least fourteen other states, to say nothing of last week's announcement by the FBI that it was opening an investigation of its own.

As if facilitating voter fraud weren't bad enough, ACORN adds insult to injury by receiving much of its funding from taxpayer's wallets. That's right, your tax-dollars subsidizing voter fraud courtesy of government bureaucracies such as the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

And there's even more to love about this organization; such as their role in our recent financial mess. What role, you may ask? That of using their "community organizing" muscle to pressure local banks to make risky loans in low income areas that they wouldn't otherwise make. And we all know what started to happen when the bubble of bad loans began to burst.

As a bonus for such good behavior, in the first (rejected) version of the recent bailout legislation, the Democrat leadership proposed that groups such as ACORN receive upwards of 20% of any net dollars the government would ultimately realize from the sale of any of the bad loans it would buy up from banks with that seven-hundred billion of our tax dollars. It's nice to have friends in high places.

So we have voter fraud to help elect liberal politicians, which then see to it that the group that commits the voter fraud gets federal dollars so it can fund committing more fraud and elect more liberals. If that doesn't meet the definition of corruption, then I don't know what does. Enron and Worldcom have nothing on these guys.

Finally, consider that Obama's campaign has admitted to paying more than $800,000 to an ACORN subsidiary for "get-out-the-vote" projects after first erroneously reporting the expenditure as simply "advance work".

Usually, with most manufactured political scandals, we're told that it's the "seriousness of the charge" that makes the issue important and worthy of investigation. Well, when it comes to massive amounts of potential electoral fraud, they would be right. Only they're not saying that now. I wonder why?

If we, and rightly so, investigate and prosecute those guilty of stealing massive amounts of money in cases of corporate fraud, how much more so should we pursue those who may be trying to steal elections?

Don't think such fraud is important? Just remember that only 110,000 Ohio votes separated us from a President Kerry in 2004, to say nothing of coming just 400 or so Florida votes shy of a President Gore in 2000. Still think it's not important?

ACORN matters because we're not just talking about money; we're talking about the integrity of our electoral system. And a corrupt electoral system leads directly to a corrupt political system which affects every facet of our lives.

Despite all the smoke, we're told not to be concerned about a fire. Nothing to see here. Move along.