Voter Fraud Alert: ACORN Members Plead Guilty, Funny Business in Texas

I was going to start discussing voter fraud next month, as it seems to be a “progressive” tradition.  However, the news beat me to it, so here are a couple related stories.

First up, more nuts have fallen from the ACORN tree.

A former employee of an embattled community organizing group pleaded guilty Tuesday to voter fraud in connection with the 2008 presidential election.

Maria Miles, 37, of Milwaukee, admitted to submitting multiple voter registration applications for some people and to scheming with other Association of Community Organization for Reform workers to sign people up several times in an effort to meet the organization’s voter registration quotas.

Miles faces up to 3 ½ years in prison at her sentencing before Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Richard Sankovitz on Oct. 15.

So, all of those things that ACORN said was not happening, obviously have happened.  These folks wouldn’t be pleading guilty if the government didn’t have to goods to get a conviction.  I also find it interesting the ACORN put these people up to this, and then threw them under the bus after they were caught.

I guess that should be a lesson to other “volunteers.”

The other story is a bit more current, at least in terms of the alleged fraud.  Texas Watchdog has the story.

Two Texas activist groups, Houston Votes and Texans Together Education Fund, were accused Tuesday of an organized voter fraud campaign by Harris County Voter Registrar Leo Vasquez, who likened the groups to the now-discredited ACORN.

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” Vasquez said at a 2 p.m. press conference at his office, where he also released copies of applications in some of the most egregious cases.

Houston Votes is the get-out-the-vote arm of the Texans Together Education Fund.

“Evidence shows that the Houston Votes and Texans Together organization are conspiring on a pattern of falsification of government documents, supporting perjury in a deliberate effort to overburden our processing system,” he said.

The story is balanced.  The other side does blast Mr. Vasquez.  I wonder if they’ll call him a racist?

Texans Together head Fred Lewis said that he has worked with Vasquez to clear up any discrepancies until recently.

“He is a liar and a political hack,” Lewis said. “We are going to the Justice Department to make sure he doesn’t make a mockery of the voting process.”

Lewis and several others from his group seeking to help register voters attended classes offered by Vasquez’ office. The group took more than 50,000 voter registration forms, Vasquez said.

But “after observing consistent and repeated patterns of apparently fraudulent or excessively sloppy work,” Vasquez and his deputies called Lewis and other group members into the office for a conference. The parties went over the troubling elements of the registrations.

Among the problems were multiple applications for one voter, some registered voters being signed up again and voters who claimed to have no Texas ID, driver’s license or Social Security card.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  A group gets caught submitting THOUSANDS of faulty voter registrations, and then cry foul when they are caught.

The more you get into the story, the more interesting it gets.  Apparently there are some connections to other organizations here as well.

Sean Caddle, the director of Houston Votes, admitted that there may have been “mistakes made” by his vote gathering team, but said Houston Votes did nothing wrong and called it a legitimate program.

After Caddle was shown examples of Houston Votes workers registering one name – Carmella Bellazer – with the same date of birth six times on the same day, he said  “that probably would be a clear case of fraud.”

Caddle is a former Service Employees International Union worker from New Jersey and also recently worked in Colorado as part of a voter registration effort there linked to the effort that turned the Centennial State from a solid red state to a Democratic stronghold.

So, I wonder how much of a connection the purple people beaters have to this effort, or, does it just show the ideology of Houston Votes (again and again).

And, it seems that a Tea Party group helped expose the fraud.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the leader of the King Street Patriots, said she became interested in digging into voter fraud after working the polls in November and seeing the potential for fraud.

“That set things into motion,” she said. “It stood to reason where the was smoke there was fire. It didn’t seem the process was tight at all.”

In the coming months, she and hundreds of other volunteers decided to start digging into public records and the group’s True the Vote initiative was born.

“We’re just digging it up and passing it to the proper authorities,” Engelbrecht said.

Good for them.  I think they do have to realize that they will be targeted for exposing this.  It’s the pattern for the left-punish those that expose them.

So, the stage is being set for November.  I think it’s safe to assume that all over the US, little “Community Organizations” are likely signing up thousands of fake or duplicate voter registrations.  While we know that this is Cloward-Piven for the electoral process, I also have to question how many of these “people” will actually vote?

I’ll be covering this a bit more in the coming weeks.