[classicman]

Originally Posted by Redux

I'm not "one of them" as you had suggested earlier... but I do believe in innocent until proven guilty. How about you?

Thanks for clearing that up. Innocent until proven guilty? Hmm, that depends on how you want to squirm out of it.

ACORN has a long history of scandal. In the state of Missouri in 1986, 12 ACORN members were convicted of voter fraud.

In December 2004, in St. Louis, six volunteers pleaded guilty to dozens of election law violations for filling out registration cards with names of dead people and other bogus information. The volunteers worked for “Operation Big Vote” — a branch of ACORN — in St. Louis.

On February 10, 2005, Nonaresa Montgomery, a paid worker who ran Operation Big Vote during the run-up to the 2001 mayoral primary, was found guilty of vote fraud. Montgomery hired about 30 workers wrote out names and information from an outdated voter list. About 1,500 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in.

In October 2006, St. Louis election officials discovered at least 1,492 “potentially fraudulent” voter registration cards. They were all turned in by ACORN volunteers.

In November 2006, 20,000 to 35,000 questionable voter registration forms were turned in by ACORN officials in Missouri. The workers admitted on camera that they were coached to tell registrants to vote for Democrat Claire McCaskill.

In 2007, in Kansas City, Missouri, four ACORN employees were indicted for fraud.

In April 2008 eight ACORN employees in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting bogus voter registrations.

Oh, and that was just Missouri.

Were all the individuals found guilty in all the cases - no.

From what I understand many times the individuals involved are charged, not ACORN or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates. By design, this allows them to maintain their innocence. Technically they are innocent by the letter of the law. They also maintain plausible deniability. These 'volunteers' get a wristslap if that, and being that they were probably students or have extremely liberal tendencies, the idea of provoking, or challenging the status-quo makes whatever penalties virtually irrelevant. In fact they may actually wear it as a badge of honor.

Is ACORN guilty? Perhaps, maybe its just a few hundred bad apples who went off on their own. Maybe they were just all overexuberant volunteers. Maybe not.


This is like the mafia, only much worse.