John Edwards, ACORN and voter fraud

Responding to “Edwards-Hunter 3-minute video", an outstanding satirical video exposing former Sen. John Edwards hyppcracy and mendacity, an alert commenter said:

In the video, when Edwards is at his press conference and makes his "No comment" concerning the National Enquirer story of his Beverly Hilton tryst], he's standing in front of a red banner. It bears the logo of ACORN, the housing-advocacy group that is one of the big winners in the bailout bill that Congress passed and President Bush signed this week.

While ACORN is the darling of much of the hard left, it has a troubled history with respect to misappropriation of funds and voter-registration fraud.

This just emphasizes that Edwards is by his own free will a very public public figure. He wants to have a hand in setting the national agenda on matters of great moral import. Examples include: the mortgage meltdown, foreclosures, the moral hazard of lenders and borrowers, federal funding of "nonpartisan" arms of left-wing political advocacy groups.

Yet while assigning responsibility is okey-dokey on matters like these... as regards to other things... not so much.

I understand that he feels this way. But why do reporters, editors, and publishers go along? The National Enquirer as the organization that's upholding journalistic standards!?

I think the commenter and most of you know why MSM has suppressed this story: Edwards is a Democrat and favorite of the Left.

As for ACORN, here’s some of what John Fund reported last July in the Wall Street Journal - - -

… But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers.

The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history" of the state.

The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters.

Given that the state doesn't require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.

Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year's Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out.

But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest--over 97%--were fake.

In Kansas City, where two Acorn workers have pleaded guilty to committing registration fraud last year while two others await trial, only 40% of the 35,000 registrations submitted by the group turned out to be bogus.

But Melody Powell, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Elections, says Acorn's claim that it brought the fraud in her city to light is "seriously misleading." She says her staff first took the evidence to the FBI, and only then Acorn helped identify the perpetrators. …

The entire Fund/WSJ report is here.

John Fund is one of the best investigative reporters and commenters there is. He work exposing voter fraud has been outstanding.

I’ll be linking to him often during the coming months.