ACORN, the supposedly defunct organization defunded by Congress in
the aftermath of James O’Keefe’s video exposing ACORN employees’
willingness to help pimps and prostitutes attain government benefits, is back.
As Judicial Watch has uncovered, the Obama administration offered $445
million to a former ACORN official as part of a $7.6 billion government
program designed to help “unemployed or substantially underemployed”
Americans make their mortgage payments.
The ACORN official, Joe McGavin, is director of Hardest Hit, an
Illinois program that received that massive Treasury infusion. Prior to
his time at Hardest Hit, McGaven was director of counseling for ACORN
Housing in Chicago, and the operations manager for Affordable Housing
Centers of America (AHCOA), an ACORN affiliate.
While ACORN was supposedly cut off from taxpayers, the facts say
otherwise. And this is just the latest indicator. As Judicial Watch
reported, “ACORN got tens of thousands of dollars in grants to ‘combat
housing and lending discrimination.’ The money came via Housing and
Urban Development (HUD), which awarded a $79,819 grant to AHCOA.”
Don’t be surprised to see the new, reorganized ACORN – now spread out
across the country, without benefit of the ACORN label – play a role in
the 2012 election cycle.
While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws
requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison,
sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme.
In a story ignored by the national media, in April 2013 a Tunica County,
Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of
fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP
website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.
Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts,
but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those
terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet
to cover the sentencing.
“This crime cuts against the fabric of our free society,” Judge Webster said.
Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins,
Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie
Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead
persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.
In the trial, forensic scientist Bo Scales testified that Sowers’s
DNA was found on the inner seals of five envelopes containing absentee
ballots.
This wasn’t Sowers’s first run-in with the law. Sowers previously had
her probation revoked for disturbing the peace at a junior high school
library, the Commercial Appeal of Memphis reported in 1990. During a
hearing at that time, Sowers played the race card. She claimed to be the
victim of “an attempt by powerful whites to silence” her, the newspaper
reported. It didn’t work. She was ordered back to prison to complete
the remaining two years of a three-year sentence she received for check
forgery.
The NAACP has had other problems with voter fraud. The NAACP National
Voter Fund registered a dead man to vote in Lake County, Ohio, in 2004.
That same year, out of 325 voter registration cards filed by the NAACP
in Cleveland, 48 were flagged as fraudulent.
But the NAACP’s voter fraud record doesn’t approach that of ACORN,
the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. At least 54
individuals employed by or associated with ACORN have been convicted of
voter fraud.
Voter fraud, sometimes called electoral fraud, is a blanket term used
by lawyers that encompasses a host of election-related improprieties
including fraudulent voting, voter registration fraud, perjury, forgery,
counterfeiting, impersonation, intimidation, and identity fraud.
And ACORN, which filed for bankruptcy last November, was itself
convicted of voter fraud in Nevada in April. Sentencing is scheduled for
Aug. 10 in Las Vegas. ACORN was also banished from Ohio in 2010 when it
settled a state racketeering filed against it by the 1851 Center for
Constitutional Law, a project of the Buckeye Institute. Under the
settlement ACORN, which is now reorganizing its state chapters under
different names, agreed never to return to the state.
Election experts say voter fraud is fairly common, but progressive
activists typically insist that the crime is virtually nonexistent.
And More And More: The Daily Caller
