Thousands of voter registration forms faked, officials say - CNN.com
CROWN POINT, Indiana (CNN) -- More than 2,000 voter registration forms filed in northern Indiana's Lake County by a liberal activist group this week have turned out to be bogus, election officials said Thursday.
The group -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN -- already faces allegations of filing fraudulent voter registrations in Nevada and faces investigations in other states.
And in Lake County, home to the long-depressed steel town of Gary, the bipartisan Elections Board has stopped processing a stack of about 5,000 applications delivered just before the October 6 registration deadline after the first 2,100 turned out to be phony.
"All the signatures looked exactly the same," Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican on the board. "Everything on the card filled out looks exactly the same."
The forms included registrations submitted in the names of the dead -- and in one case, the name of a fast-food restaurant, Jimmy Johns. Sally LaSota, a Democrat on the board, called the forms fraudulent and said whoever filed them broke the law.
"ACORN, with its intent, perhaps was good in the beginning, but went awry somewhere," LaSota said.
Over the past four years, a dozen states have investigated complaints of fraudulent registrations filed by ACORN. On Tuesday, Nevada authorities raided an ACORN office in Las Vegas, Nevada, where workers are accused of registering members of the Dallas Cowboys football team. And the group has become the target of Republican attacks on
voter fraud, a perennial GOP issue.
A subsidiary of the group was paid $800,000 by Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama's campaign to register voters for the 2008 primaries, and ACORN's political wing endorsed Obama back in February. But Obama's campaign told CNN that it "is committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process," and said it has not worked with ACORN during the general election.
yep, he's gonna change things all right...... he's gonna try to change us all into subjects.
