ACORN's Gift to Minnesota Al Franken

 Did ACORN Elect Al Franken? Remember Franken won his seat by a little more than 300 votes and ACORN might have helped Franken to get his "landslide" margin in one of two waysin the actual counting of the votes, or the new voters registered by ACORN.

"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." Joseph Stalin

Minneapolis Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was the guy in charge of counting the votes. Richie a former Community Organizer, was elected two years ago with help from former  self-described Nazi Collaborator George Soros and ACORN.

In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN Political Action Committee endorsed Ritchie and donated to his campaign. According to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, contributors to Ritchie's campaign included liberal philanthropists George Soros, Drummond Pike, and Deborah Rappaport, along with veteran community organizer Heather Booth, a Saul Alinsky disciple who co-founded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone. One article on Ritchie's 2006 campaign website brags about the fine work ACORN did in Florida to pass a constitutional amendment to raise that state's minimum wage.

It was revealed during a panel discussion at the Democratic Party's convention in Denver this summer that the Democracy Alliance, a financial clearinghouse created by Soros and insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, approved the Secretary of State Project as a grantee. The Democracy Alliance aspires to create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups-a kind of "vast left-wing conspiracy" to compete with the conservative movement. It has brokered more than $100 million in grants to liberal nonprofits including ACORN. The aforementioned Pike and Rappaport, who gave money to Ritchie's campaign, are members of the Democracy Alliance.

In the Minnesota Star Tribune Katherine Kersten uses ACORN's track record of election fraud to suppose the effect on the election:

....It's worth recalling, however, that ACORN is best-known for its massive voter-registration campaigns, which focus relentlessly on getting Democrats elected in targeted states. Here its record is appalling -- and goes to the heart of our democratic electoral system.

In October 2008, ACORN announced triumphantly that it had registered about 1.3 million new voters in 18 battleground states, among them Minnesota. A few weeks later, however, the director of Project Vote -- an ACORN affiliate -- acknowledged to the New York Times that election officials had rejected about 400,000 of those, for reasons including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and (in the Times' words) "fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors."

Nothing new here. ACORN's registration drives "routinely produce fraudulent registrations," according to a staff report released in July 2009 by the ranking Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The report describes ACORN as "a criminal conspiracy" and details violations ranging from unpaid taxes to a million-dollar embezzlement and cover-up. "To date," the report says, "nearly 70 ACORN employees have been convicted in 12 states for voter-registration fraud."

....ACORN's practices can make fraud difficult to detect. For example, "at election offices around the country, ACORN workers are famous for waiting until registration deadline to dump thousands of new documents on overworked clerks -- making it harder for them to fully vet the registration forms," according to the New York Post.

As a result, fraud often only comes to light by chance. Fraud "has been discovered by cursory checks or by accident," John Samples, an election expert at the Cato Institute, told the Post. "There's a lot more out there to be discovered."

Here in Minnesota, ACORN has boasted of playing a major role in the 2008 elections. It claims to have registered 43,000 new voters, which it describes as 75 percent of the state's new registrations. Franken's margin of victory in the Senate race was razor-thin: 312 votes out of about 3 million cast. And Minnesota's laws on proof of voter eligibility are notoriously loose. Did ACORN folks pull some fast ones to help get their favorite son Franken elected -- a win that handed Democrats the 60-vote, veto-proof majority that they needed to enact their liberal agenda?

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie assures us that Minnesota's system of voter verification protects electoral integrity. And for that I refer you back to the top point above.

Many people on the left may throw at you the fact that ACORN didn't throw the national election one way or another, and that may very well be true.  But consider this, if Obamacare gets passed by one single vote in the Senate, and that one vote was Al Franken, then one can reasonably claim that ACORN may have had a major role in Obama getting his agenda passed. 312 votes, one crooked community organizing group, it is very possible.