Ohio Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner Violated Federal Election Law

Thanks to MM:

It turns out that a federal court has found that Jennifer Brunner vioated federal law in her attempt to get unlimited voter registrations on the rolls. Chickens is coming home to roost.

A federal court ruled tonight that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner violated federal election laws by not taking adequate steps to validate the identity of newly registered voters.

The ruling from U.S. District Court Judge George C. Smith called the identification breakdown “a serious problem” and ordered Brunner to immediately comply with federal requirements to match voter registration data with the information in the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Social Security Administration databases. The court accused Brunner of failing to provide county election administrators with “an effective way to access and review mismatches.” She immediately appealed the ruling.

“For some reason, Jennifer Brunner does not want these new registrations checked,” said Ohio Republican Party Deputy Chairman Kevin DeWine. “Her refusal to comply with federal law raises serious concerns about her ability to objectively oversee this election. It’s especially troubling in light of her connection to ACORN and that group’s stunning confession this week of fraudulent registration activity happening right here in Ohio.”

Brunner’s effort to fight the court order comes just two days after the Democrat activist group ACORN admitted to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that the group engages in fraudulent voter registration activity.

Ohio ACORN officials “blamed the elections board for not scrutinizing ACORN’s suspicious cards,” claiming the group “can’t be expected to catch everything.”

ACORN is facing similar inquires in other Ohio counties as well as 10 other states. Members of the group’s “voter-mobilization arm,” Project Vote, regularly advise Brunner on election strategy, even recently issuing a news release that claims credit for Brunner’s directive restricting challenges to suspected fraudulent voter registrations. Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama also has strong ties to ACORN, working previously as an attorney and “leadership trainer” for the group.

An Ohio history:

The Columbus Dispatch, 5/9/07: In what might be a Franklin County first, a Reynoldsburg man was indicted yesterday for voting twice in the November election. … [An attorney] said Gilbert was registered in both counties by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a nonprofit agency that has come under fire in 12 states for voter fraud.

Associated Press, 9/20/06: The mother of a 16-year-old has told the Summit County elections board that her daughter was registered to vote, just two months after a 10-year-old boy was summoned for jury duty because he was on the county’s voter rolls. …The board plans to issue subpoenas to the girl and the person who filed the voter registration application, Prentice McNary of Akron, a circulator paid by Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, [board director Bryan] Williams said.

The Columbus Dispatch, 9/1/06: Concerns about bogus names increased recently as Franklin County Elections Board staffers questioned the validity of hundreds of names on registration forms and petitions for a proposed constitutional amendment to boost Ohio’s minimum wage. Most of the disputed names came from lists provided by paid solicitors working for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

The Columbus Dispatch, 8/30/06: Franklin County elections officials plan to issue subpoenas to paid solicitors suspected of forging hundreds of signatures on ballot-issue petitions and voter-registration forms. … Most have come from people paid by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which was blamed for similar problems with voter-registration forms in 2004.

The Plain Dealer, 8/11/06: Potentially fraudulent voter registration cards have turned up in at least three Ohio counties, and 500 have been turned over to a prosecutor to determine if a crime has been committed. Matt Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said the 500 cards his office referred to County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien Wednesday were collected between March and July by workers for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/23/04: Cuyahoga County election officials are investigating more than a thousand possible fraudulent voter registrations – including one for Jive Turkey Sr. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Friday that the name is one in a string of fake names on new voter rolls. Others include Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins and Michael Jordan in Defiance County.

The Columbus Dispatch, 9/8/04: A part-time worker signing up new voters for a local community group has been indicted by a Franklin County grand jury on charges he forged a registration form. … The charges stem from an investigation that began in May after the Franklin County Board of Elections discovered dozens of voter registration forms with fake names or false information. They were submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which paid workers bonuses based on the number of voters they registered.

The Columbus Dispatch, 6/3/04: A nonprofit group registering low-income and minority voters in Franklin County has fired two temporary workers thought to be the source of fake names and forged signatures on official registration forms. ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also has agreed to perform extra checks on forms turned in by its voter-registration workers before submitting them to the Franklin County Board of Elections, the group’s head organizer said yesterday.

Obama Claims He Never Worked For ACORN

Thanks to Sweetness and Light for finding this

On Obama’s Fight the Smears rapid respponse website, it notes:

Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN

Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called “Motor Voter,” Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995…

However…

What Makes Obama Run?

Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack Obama doesn’t need another career. But he’s entering politics to get back to his true passion–community organization.

By Hank De Zutter
December 8, 1995

… Another strong supporter of Obama’s work–as an organizer, as a lawyer, and now as a candidate–is Madeline Talbott, lead organizer of the feisty ACORN community organization, a group that’s a thorn in the side of most elected officials. “I can’t repeat what most ACORN members think and say about politicians. But Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”

Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side. Conducting a session in a New Horizons classroom, Obama, tall and thin, looks very much like an Ivy League graduate student. Dressed casually prep, his tie loosened and his top shirt button unfastened, he leads eight black women from the Grand Boulevard community through a discussion of “what folks should know” about who in Chicago has power and why they have it. It’s one of his favorite topics, and the class bubbles with suggestions about how “they” got to be high and mighty…

That’s cute, in addition:

Project Vote is the voter-mobilization arm of ACORN. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose professed purpose is to carry out “non-partisan” voter registration drives; to counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of voting rights — focusing on the rights of the poor and the “disenfranchised.” …

and…

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

ACORN is rearin its ugly head across the country. I didn’t think this would play out, but it looks like it might

Michelle also has an article about the thug thizzle and ACORN fraud across America:

In addition to the Las Vegas raid, fraud allegations keep piling up:

— Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected a large portion of the 5,000 registration forms ACORN turned in after conducting registration drives in the area all summer. Some vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from telephone books and forged signatures. According to local reports, “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 included dead people and underage kids.

On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 voter applications were no good — tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen.

– Last month, Milwaukee, Wis., officials discovered at least seven felons employed as voter registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter registration cards. The state GOP accused ACORN of attempting to enroll dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to 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. According to the Miami Herald, “One individual had 21 duplicate applications.”

Election officials had flagged ACORN’s negligent practices several 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 that constitute a fifth of all new voters in that region.

– In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people received free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling prospects to the polls. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who told her 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.”

More ACORN Goodness

Lookie here, the search warrant for the ACORN Nevada raid has come online. 

 

The last sentence of the first paragraph is priceless – lazy crack-heads.

Here is a little more info on the bust from the Las Vegas Sun

 

No one has been arrested.

ACORN’s interim chief organizer Bertha Lewis released a statement calling the Secretary of State’s office raid “a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than [to] discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible vote to the polls.”

ACORN had received a subpoena dated Sept. 19 requesting information on 15 employees, all of whose names had been included in packages previously submitted to election officials, Lewis said. ACORN provided its personnel records on the 15 employees on Sept. 29, she said.

“For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application in to election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual,” Lewis said. “Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act.”

ACORN representatives met with election officials and a representative of the Secretary of State’s office on July 17 and were asked to provide a second copy of documents previously provided, she said. She said ACORN gave officials copies of 46 application packages, which involved 33 former canvassers.

In a 19-page affidavit by criminal investigator Colin Hayes of the Secretary of State’s office, Hayes said 59 inmates worked for ACORN between March 5 and July 31.

One ex-employee of ACORN, Jason Anderson, rose to the rank of a supervisor in the voter registration program although he was a convicted felon and an inmate at Casa Grande at the time, the affidavit said.

In addition to the records ACORN had given state officials, Clark County election workers discovered another 183 suspicious files, each with different voters’ names, the affidavit said. In some cases, dozens of people had no records in Nevada, or addresses didn’t exist, the affidavit said.

 

Fighting Back in Ohio

From Michelle

Republicans have won a round with Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in what’s turned into an ongoing dispute over voting procedures.

A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday, Oct. 2, ordered Brunner to tell county boards of elections not to reject applications for absentee ballots because of an unmarked box next to next to a statement that the applicant is a qualified elector.

“No vital public purpose or public interest is served by rejecting electors’ applications for absentee ballots because of an unmarked check box next to a qualified-elector statement,” the Supreme Court decision said.

The absentee ballot applications in question were supplied by Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign. Other application forms for absentee ballots don’t include the boxes.

Not a big win, but a win

McCain Pulls Out of Michigan

J-Mart at Politico reports that J-Mac is pulling out of Michigan.

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida.   Wisconsin went for Kerry in 2004, Ohio and Florida for Bush.

we should focus on Pennsylvania and keeping Ohio from going thug thizzle

Even More Voter Fraud in Ohio

Courtesy of MM:

Yesterday they were registering homeless people who were not even from Ohio. Now we learn that election observers can even watch as the homeless get their thug thizzle on?  If the Opacalypse happens, he can directly thank Ohio Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner who may be able to fraud her way into his cabinet.

We re taking action mind you:

The GOP fights Back
Party working on multi-tiered plan The Ohio Republican Party always encourages EVERYONE to register to vote. But, they do not encourage fraudulent activities. The Ohio Republican Party is not taking this full scale assault on the law lightly. We have defensive and offensive options. 1. The Defensive- litigation A lawsuit has been filed with the Ohio Supreme Court to stop the 5 day window. Hopefully the Court will rule our way and close down the window. Then we can go back to the business of campaigning. We are hopeful the Court will rule by Monday. If the Supreme Court does not rule against Brunner in time, we will need to go on the offensive and use the 5 day window to our own advantage. We need to make sure all of our unregistered family and friends are registered and vote this week. We need to drive them ourselves if necessary. 2. The Offensive
The ORP is doing all sorts of things to inform the public about the 5 day window. On your way to church tomorrow, you may hear our new radio ad on Christian Radio stations around the state. We are also doing phone banking and door-to-door. We are also pushing our message via email to everyone we possibly can. Please forward this email to anyone you can think of.

Update: This is getting some fair and balanced coverage. At least people will know.