Posted on July 7, 2009

Experts: Did ACORN Elect Al Franken?

David A. Patten, Newsmax, July 6, 2009

Democrat Al Franken’s emergence as the victor of the marathon Minnesota election battle has triggered growing complaints from those who blame former Sen. Norm Coleman’s defeat on the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN).

Matthew Vadum, senior editor for the Capital Research Center think tank, {snip} points out that ACORN registers voters who are expected to vote Democratic in overwhelming numbers, based on demographics. In the year leading up to the election, ACORN tallied 43,000 new registrations in Minnesota. That was likely a decisive factor in a contest decided by 312 votes out of nearly 3 million ballots cast.

Vadum comments, “It just seems probable that they got enough fraudulent registrations in, in order to swing the vote. But I don’t have evidence that they did. More likely than not, it played a role.”

{snip} Vadum tells Newsmax ACORN “set in motion a process that allowed an election to be stolen.”

That process, Vadum says, began when ACORN helped Minnesota’s secretary of state, Mark Ritchie, get elected in 2006. Ritchie is a favorite son of the George Soros-funded Secretary of State Project (SOS), which has succeeded in installing partisans in key state positions that can influence election outcomes.

Ritchie, for example, presided over the recount that saw Coleman lose an apparent lead of 775 votes on Election Day. All of Coleman’s legal challenges to that recount were thwarted.

{snip}

The Justice Department and over a dozen states have launched investigations into ACORN’s activities, charging ACORN set illegal quotas that pressured canvassers into submitting fraudulent registrations.

Prosecutors filed 39 felony counts against the group in Nevada. Four former ACORN workers are standing trial on charges in Pittsburgh that they forged or illegally solicited voter registrations in November. And in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, prosecutors have indicted Darnell Nash, a voter who was registered by ACORN, for voting illegally. Officials say Nash registered to vote on nine occasions, using different names and addresses each time. And investigators say as many as 4,000 ACORN voter registrations in Ohio may have been fraudulent.

{snip}

To some it seems curious that Minnesota, the only state with a marathon election dispute stemming from the 2008 election, has thus far refused to launch an investigation into ACORN or possible vote fraud. Investigators in Dakota County are looking into about 50 cases where felons may have voted illegally.

{snip}

Heather S. Heidelbaugh, vice president of the Republican National Lawyers Association, tells Newsmax: “When you’re running for U.S. Senate and you’re going to affect potentially the balance of the Senate, and potentially affect whether major pieces of legislation are passed and whether our nation changes course in major philosophical ways–you’re talking about an enormous, enormous effect of potential fraud.”

{snip}

Specifically, von Spakovsky [Hans A. von Spakovsky, an election expert at the Heritage Foundation] says, “Minnesota really has no system for checking and verifying the accuracy of its voter registration system.”

{snip}

Minnesota Majority has filed a lawsuit alleging that Ritchie and 25 county election officials failed to reconcile their registrations–the routine process of matching votes cast with actual people registered and living at valid addresses. Cleaning up the voter rolls periodically is required by law.

Minnesota Majority [a nonprofit organization with Republican backing] founder Jeff Davis says he’s also very concerned also about votes cast illegally by felons, by non-citizens, and by individuals who provided residential addresses that do not exist, including “city parks, business developments, freeways, and empty lots.”

“Minnesota is doing absolutely nothing to investigate or verify any of that information,” says Von Spakovsky. “It points out that in a close election where every vote counts, that kind of a sloppy system can allow someone to steal an election.”

{snip}

Davis is calling for a federal investigation of vote-registration procedures in the state. He tells Newsmax that the state’s failure to reconcile its voter database casts a shadow over the validity of some 30,000 ballots cast in November.

{snip}