It was a proud moment for Nevada last Wednesday when a Las Vegas judge ordered officials of ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - to stand trial on felony voter registration fraud charges. It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of folks.
With ACORN facing similar charges in several other states, federal agencies and some banks and insurance companies are scrambling to distance themselves from the organization, and with good reason. The Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service have cut ties to ACORN, and both houses of Congress have voted to de-fund the organization, which has received more than $53 million taxpayer dollars since 1994.
A bright young Chicago attorney named Barack Obama was a legal adviser to the organization, and just last year Obama's presidential election campaign paid $832,000 to an ACORN subsidiary for a get-out-the-vote effort.
To her credit, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, filed voter registration fraud charges against ACORN last May after Clark County Voter Registrar Larry Lomax determined that nearly half of 90,000 voter registration forms submitted by the organization were fraudulent.
"If ACORN ... failed to get any unqualified electors to the polls to cast illegal ballots, it wasn't for lack of trying," the Las Vegas Review-Journal opined.
In August, Cortez Masto cut a deal with Christopher Edwards, the alleged mastermind of the phony Nevada voter registration scheme. In exchange for guilty pleas to two gross misdemeanor counts of paying illegal voter registration bonuses to field workers, Edwards agreed to testify against other defendants in the case, who "registered" Disney characters and the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys, among others.
Even worse, a pair of amateur videographers last month captured ACORN officials on tape advising a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute on how to commit tax fraud. ACORN fired a couple of employees, promised an in-house investigation and threatened to sue the videographers. But that's not good enough. The Justice Department should prosecute the organization to the full extent of the law.
In his recent talk show blitz, President Obama tried to distance himself from ACORN.
"Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," the president said as he declined to reveal whether he favored a federal funds cutoff to the organization. Without federal funding, ACORN would probably disappear, an outcome we should welcome.
•••
"Northern Nevada Journalism, Then and Now" is the title of a talk I'll offer at the Gold Hill Hotel at
7:30 p.m. this Tuesday, Oct. 6. See you there.
• Semi-retired journalist Guy W. Farmer resides in Carson City.
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