ACORN Visits Obama White House

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American Spectator:


Leaders of the resurrected radical group ACORN are lobbying the Obama administration in what appears to be a concerted effort to game the electoral system to help Democrats, new evidence suggests.

At least five Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now leaders have visited the White House this year alone. One of those ACORN officials has been involved in vetting Department of Justice hires who may help to enforce the voter fraud-enabling National Voting Rights Act (NVRA), also known as the Motor-Voter law. The Department has come under fire for refusing to enforce Section 8, which requires states to remove the names of ineligible felons, the dead, and non-residents from voter rolls, while zealously enforcing Section 7, which requires states to register voters at welfare offices.

As I argue in my book published earlier this year, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, those on relief tend to support Democrats, so Section 7 amounts to a taxpayer subsidy for Democratic candidates. Project Vote founder Sanford Newman openly admits his group's work helps the Left almost exclusively. "While our work is nonpartisan, it is realistic to assume that upward of 90 percent of the people we register on unemployment and other social service distribution lines will oppose politicians who have supported cuts in the programs on which they rely," he said. "They are likely to vote Democratic in most instances."

President Obama long ago endorsed the strategy of using welfare recipients to expand the size and scope of government. "All our people must know that politics and voting affects their lives directly," he said in 1992. "If we're registering people in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and who's responsible."

According to documents obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act, former ACORN attorney Estelle H. Rogers, who is now director of advocacy at ACORN-affiliated Project Vote, wrote T. Christian Herren, Chief of the Voting Section in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, recommending three prospective new DOJ employees.

Project Vote is the unit of the ACORN network that President Obama worked for in 1992 when he ran a successful get-out-the-vote drive in Illinois that helped to solidify his reputation as an effective leader and organizer. Obama went on to train ACORN activists and represent ACORN in court as the group's lawyer. Project Vote's official position is that voter fraud is a myth invented by Republicans to disenfranchise Democratic voters. The group vilifies as a racist anyone who thinks voter ID requirements are a good idea and constantly presses to make voting requirements even more lax than they now are.

In a Feb. 23, 2010 email to DOJ's Herren, Rogers wrote, "I want to heartily recommend two candidates to you." (The names of the candidates were redacted.) In a follow-up email dated April 20, 2010, Rogers wrote, "I look forward to continuing to work with you, Chris. And please let me know if you need any more feedback regarding hires." In an Oct. 21, 2010 email, Herren told Rogers his door was always open. "If you have any issues that come up that you want us to be aware of, please feel free to shoot us an email…"