Today is Philly vs. Las Vegas Day: ACORN Lawsuit in PA, Nevada ACORN Charges Standing

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Twice in one day I'm drawing parallels with Las Vegas & Philadelphia. Yesterday, The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and Project Vote filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The lawsuit charges that a Pennsylvania law unconstitutionally restricts ACORN's right to conduct voter-registration drives by effectively prohibiting it from using paid canvassers.

ACORN cites the Pennsylvania statute at issue that makes it a crime to "give, solicit or accept payment or financial incentive to obtain a voter registration if the payment or incentive is based upon the number of registrations or applications obtained."

The lawsuit is a response to criminal charges against five ACORN workers who collected and submitted bogus voter registration forms in the Pittsburgh area during the 2008 presidential election. Prosecutors in Allegheny County charged them with forging cards, falsifying dates of birth and Social Security numbers to fulfill ACORN’s daily quota of 20 new forms.

As well all know, ACORN employees have been charged in Nevada for similar actions. It is being alleged that ACORN is also charged with more than two dozen felonies for operating a similar fraud-infested voter registration drive in Nevada last year and could face additional charges for submitting fake registration cards in Florida and New Mexico. Our Nevada prosecutors say ACORN illegally compensated workers to register voters based on a corporate mandated quote system, which led them to submit thousands of registrations with fake names and addresses throughout the state.

As it turns out, it looks like ACORN hired convicted felons to register voters in Las Vegas. It is likely that they got many of the workers from a transitional housing facility operated by the Nevada Department of Corrections. Seriously? In a search warrant affidavit one ACORN employee said many of the canvassers were “lazy crack heads” who were not interested in working and just wanted the money for getting more registrants. Well, I guess you get what you pay for. Maybe ACORN should have paid better incentives so the cover up would have been of a higher calibre.

Either way, once again TODAY, PA & NV are headed down the same path, though on this path they are going after ACORN.

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