Voter Fraud

While the McCain campaign continues to slime ACORN for voter fraud, and the mainstream media dutifully echoes the allegations, the GOP continues to hire companies who do exactly what the right claims the community organization has done. This time, one of those companies got busted, according to this article in today's Los Angeles Times.

The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.

Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters. ...

Several dozen voters recently told The Times that YPM workers said they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Other voters said they had no idea their registration was being changed.

YPM has been accused of using bait-and-switch tactics across the country. Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit.

Now, Mr. Jacoby claims that the address he used was his parent's home, which he uses as his official address because he travels so much. Oddly enough, people at and near the address he used don't know who he is. But that's only part of the problem. The larger part of the problem is the deception used by his workers to snag people into the Republican rolls.

ACORN, whose officials noted some unusual registrations and themselves pointed out the irregularities to election officials for further investigation, is one of those community organizations so decried by the GOP as being socialist and dangerous. At least ACORN didn't have to lie to the people it was registering, nor did the Democratic Party have to pay ACORN for its efforts.

Messing with the voter rolls: that's truly dangerous to a democracy. But, hey!, that's all the GOP has this time around.