An appearance helped along by the fact that only a day after Mccain picked this up as an issue, two top FBI officials leaked the fact that they were investigating ACORN. I assume this is the Bush October surprise - but I doubt it will get any traction. I suspect the McCain campaign want to divert attention from the McCain/Bush comparisons, so the Bush administration used the DOJ for political purposes again. An addition to the current probe is definitely warranted.

Obama campaign wants Attorneygate prosecutor to probe GOP's 'sham anti-fraud campaign'

Published: Friday October 17, 2008


The current spate of trumped-up allegations of "voter fraud" coming from John McCain's campaign and his Republican allies and the FBI's decision to investigate represents exactly the same sort of politicization of justice that is at the root of an ongoing investigation into the firing of federal prosecutors, Barack Obama's campaign alleges.

Obama attorney Bob Bauer has asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to expand the authority of the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the US Attorney firings to also include the fraud allegations. The campaign released a seven-page letter (.pdf) Bauer wrote to Mukasey on Friday requesting the investigation.

"Now, on the emerging evidence of recent conduct undertaken by Bush Administration officials, Republican Party officials, and representatives of the McCain-Palin campaign," he wrote, "it appears that further misconduct of the same nature, directly relevant to the work of the Special Prosecutor, requires that the scope of the Special Prosecutor's assignment be expanded."

Bauer cites the case of former US Attorney David Iglesias, who represented the District of New Mexico until 2006. Bush administration officials reportedly conspired to sack Iglesias in part because of his unwillingness to bring specious voter-fraud charges before an election. Iglesias this week called the voter fraud investigations a scare tactic and said he was shocked to see the FBI was pursuing an investigation based on similarly unmerited accusations of fraud.

On a conference call with reporters Friday, Bauer slammed the "illicit involvement of senior law enforcement officials" in leaking the details of the so-called fraud investigation. The Obama lawyer noted that the leak came "literally within 24 hours" of McCain's statement at Wednesday night's debate that ACORN was threatening the "fabric of our democracy."

The McCain campaign has turned attacking ACORN into a central theme of its campaign in recent weeks, with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin continuing the assault at a rally in Ohio on Friday.

The community organization, witch which Obama has previously been involved, has produced a relatively small number of inaccurate registration forms in connection with its drive to sign up a million new voters, but it has not been registering voters directly on Obama's behalf and there's no evidence that it's actions in this or any previous election cycle have led to widespread voter fraud.

Bauer said the "reckless and incendiary" attacks from the McCain campaign were aimed more at intimidating voters than at ferreting out fraud. ACORN primarily registered low-income and minority voters, and voting rights advocates fear those voters might not turn out on Election Day to avoid potential harassment at the polls.

The Supreme Court also delivered a setback to the GOP on Friday, ruling against Ohio Republicans who have been feuding with the Secretary of State over registration rules.

Bauer said the conduct he outlines is "directly relevant" to the special prosecutor's investigation and requested a meeting with Mukasey to discuss expanding the investigation.

"Once is more than enough," he wrote. "The Department has yet to recover its credibility after the calamitous politicization of its mission in this Administration and the documented misconduct ... that resulted from the corrupt injection of politics into federal law enforcement."

__________________
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

sham?

Wonder if you live in Ohio? Probably not. Wonder if you see ACORN doing this on a daily basis? Probably not. Wonder if you have 13 people registered to ONE house in your state would that raise an flag in your opinion?

Here are some local articles..

Voter Registration Records Investigated
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 6:28 PM
Updated: Thursday, October 16, 2008 6:49 AM

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Franklin County Prosecutor was investigating 13 voters after each of them listed the same address on their voter registrations, 10TV News reported on Wednesday.

Each of the voters listed a home on Brownlee Avenue, located on the city's east side, as their address, 10TV's Patrick Bell reported.

Two of the voters cast their ballots during early voting at Veteran's Memorial. The other voters requested to vote early by mail.

"At this point nothing is illegal, that's why we are investigating," said Franklin County Board of Elections director Michael Stinziano. "We know that there are 13 people living there. Whether or not there is anything illegal going on, we don't know. That's still part of the investigation.

Stinziano said they were waiting on the outcome of the prosecutor's investigation to determine if the voters were valid, Bell reported.

According to The Columbus Dispatch, 200,000 Ohio voters gave officials drivers' license and social security numbers that do not match their registration forms.

Watch 10TV News and refresh 10TV.com for additional information.

Link

Link 2

Its a real issue in Ohio. I have no problem with US Citizens who vote. But I have a problem when the Sec of State won't check to see if they are a) US Citizens B) Ohioians, C) Not Felons, D) 18 years old, E) Actual real people.

Disenfranchised my ***. Sec of State Brunner has been talked for 2 years now about updating the system.. yet some how she failed at doing that and now is using that as an excuse to allow 200,000 new registered voters in the last 2 months go unchecked.

Ohio was stolen from Kerry in 2004. Ohio probably will be stolen again this year.

__________________
Pioneers are walking all around singing songs about Lenin and they should be shot for it.

Handlebars

"If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"- V

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

come on you know you wanna play football..

Beagán agus a rá go maith.

Economic Left/Right: 3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87

Canvassers, not ACORN, at fault

By GREGORY ROBERTS
P-I REPORTER

Last year, a top elections official implicated the community group ACORN in what he called "the worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history of the state of Washington."

Referring to similar shenanigans by ACORN this year in other states, Republican John McCain said in Wednesday's presidential campaign debate that the group is "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history ... maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." McCain sought to tie his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, to ACORN.

But however deplorable the behavior of ACORN workers in submitting phony registrations for the likes of cartoon characters and sports stars, it seems unlikely that the group's misdeeds will affect many votes in November.

In issuing his dire warning in the debate, McCain apparently conflated voter-registration fraud with voter fraud. Voter-registration fraud -- at least, of the type ACORN workers committed in Seattle last year and allegedly engaged in elsewhere this year -- is annoying, potentially costly to taxpayers and certainly illegal, but not, by itself, a serious threat to democratic foundations.

Voter fraud, on the other hand, can change the outcome of elections.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a Republican, said last year that the ACORN case in Seattle had nothing to do with manipulating outcomes and everything to do with the workers' efforts to keep their $8-an-hour jobs. If anyone was defrauded, it was ACORN, an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

"The defendants ... cheated their employers to get paid for work they did not actually perform," Satterberg said. "The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets."

In the Seattle case, temporary workers hired by ACORN for a voter registration drive gathered at the downtown Seattle library to fill out bogus registration forms.

They copied names from newspaper stories -- such as those of actress Katie Holmes, New York Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera and New York Times columnist Frank Rich -- pulled them from baby-name books and telephone directories or just made them up. They wrote in the addresses of homeless shelters for a majority of the 1,762 phony registrations they turned in to elections officials.

But that's as far as it went.

In accordance with procedures, elections workers submit the information from any registration they receive to the state's computerized voter system. But if the identification numbers also required on a registration form -- typically, a driver's license number, or the last four digits of a Social Security number -- fail to match up with the voter names in the appropriate databases, the registration is flagged.

It county workers can't clear up the discrepancy, the would-be voter is provisionally registered: For poll voters, that means they must show identification at the polling place to vote, and for absentee voters, it means they must mail in proper identification documents with their ballot for the ballot to be validated and counted.

Provisional registrations are canceled after two federal election cycles if they are not validated. In the case of the fraudulent ACORN registrations, they were cancelled last year as a result of the criminal investigation, which was triggered when elections workers noticed similarities in handwriting for many signatures on the registration forms. No votes were cast based on those registrations.

Elections procedures vary from state to state, but under a 2002 federal law, voters are required to show identification at the polls, or to provide identification information that is verified before voting by mail ballot.

Voter fraud occurs when voters deliberately cast ineligible ballots. For example, a voter may fill out, sign and return a mail ballot sent to a fellow resident who recently died. Or a voter could impersonate an eligible voter and register and vote in that person's name. Or a voter who is not a U.S. citizen could nonetheless sign the oath of citizenship on the registration form and be placed on the rolls. Proven cases of voter fraud are rare.

Another type of elections fraud involves crimes committed by elections workers, such as creating bogus registrations and then filling out and counting ballots under those entries. McCain has not suggested that might occur in November.

Although several canvassers were convicted in Seattle in the 2007 case, ACORN itself was not charged. The organization agreed to pay the county $25,000 as reimbursement for investigative costs and promised to clean up its act.

ACORN -- a national organization that not only conducts voter registration drives but also advocates on behalf of the poor and working class on housing, credit and education issues -- has toed the line this year in King County, elections officials say. But the organization may not have done so well in submitting 1.3 million registration forms collected by 13,000 workers in 21 states. Reports have surfaced of attempted registrations under the name Mickey Mouse, or of voter cards in Nevada filled out with the names of football players on the Dallas Cowboys, or of multiple registrations signed in the same handwriting.

Obama represented ACORN as an attorney, along with the U.S. Justice Department, in a successful 1995 lawsuit against the state of Illinois that made it easier for people to register at driver's license offices. He has disavowed any connection to ACORN's current voter-registration effort.

Canvassers, not ACORN, at fault

__________________
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

BTW - I happen to have 5 registered voters living in my house. If a house is split up into apts, or rents roonms - 13 isn't that many. Hell, I lved with that many in one house when I was in college!

__________________
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

Damn liberals like Thomas and Scalia!

Supreme Court throws out Ohio GOP election lawsuit

THE WASHINGTON POST
October 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court Friday sided with Ohio's Democratic secretary of state in a dispute with the Republican Party over voter registration, lifting a lower court's order that Democrats said could have disenfranchised thousands of voters in a crucial battleground state ahead of next month's elections.

In a brief unsigned opinion, the justices vacated a temporary restraining order that directed Jennifer Brunner to update the Statewide Voter Registration Database almost immediately to comply with a section of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The law sets requirements for verifying voter eligibility.

The Ohio Republican Party wanted Brunner, as secretary of state, to provide county election boards with lists of newly registered voters whose driver's licenses or Social Security numbers on registration forms did not match records in state databases. The GOP argued that the county boards needed the lists to prevent vote fraud.

Brunner contended that the temporary restraining order, entered by a federal court in Ohio on Oct. 9, could have disenfranchised voters "because of federal government red tape, misstated technical information or glitches in databases" beyond their control. Of 666,000 voters who have registered in Ohio since Jan. 1, about 200,000 have mismatches and could have been forced to cast provisional ballots instead of regular ones, Brunner said. If so, such ballots would have been tallied only if the discrepancies were cleared up shortly after Nov. 4.

The Supreme Court said that it has "no opinion on whether HAVA is being properly implemented."

__________________
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

And, of course, we have not even addressed the DOJ leak - which is the actual subject of the lawsuit.

__________________
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

Yeah, and that home in Columbus Ohio which is 2885 Brownlee Avenue, is a single family home. Go to google maps, type in 2885 Brownlee Avenue, Columbus Ohio. Look at the neighborhood.. tell me 13 people in a home like that..

You will see its just as a described it. As I pass through the neighborhood when ever I want to avoid traffic during rush hour on I-70 which runs just south of Livingston Ave.

The group that's involved in this mess is Vote for Home. They "help" people vote.. be it homeless or whoever. But the issue is, couple of them have voted, they don't reside in Ohio.. in fact the "leader" resided in Oxford, England.

If they are willing to vote in Ohio knowing the law, how many laws did they break?

__________________
Pioneers are walking all around singing songs about Lenin and they should be shot for it.

Handlebars

"If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"- V

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

come on you know you wanna play football..

Beagán agus a rá go maith.

Economic Left/Right: 3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87

So you don't think Bob Bauer has a motive to make these allegations?


Think about it Jojo.. an Obama Attorney makes claims against claims of the DoJ and the FBI. How dare he question the Government.. as you try to tie Liddy's comments as the same of the actions of Ayers.

Hypocrite.

__________________
Pioneers are walking all around singing songs about Lenin and they should be shot for it.

Handlebars

"If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"- V

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

come on you know you wanna play football..

Beagán agus a rá go maith.

Economic Left/Right: 3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87

Electoral fraud is just as bad.

__________________
The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish! - Frederick Bastiat