ACORN: Can We Trust Anything They Say?

[Originally published at Family Security Matters Apr. 22, 2009]

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said that, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The community activist organization ACORN seems to have taken a page from Goebbels’ playbook because CEO and Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis has repeatedly denied that ACORN is involved in voter fraud.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) is a self-proclaimed “nonpartisan” social justice organization that runs one of the nation’s largest voter registration drives in order to elect Democrats and advance ACORN’s agenda. Surrounded by controversy, ACORN has been implicated in over a dozen states for voter fraud in addition to mafia-style racketeering tactics worthy of a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Practices Act (RICO) investigation. But to listen to Lewis, however, one would get the impression that ACORN has done nothing wrong.

On Lou Dobbs’ Apr. 7 CNN program “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Lewis asserted that “ACORN is not being investigated anywhere in any state.”

Not so. No less than nine states are currently investigating ACORN (Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, and New Mexico) which Dobbs confirmed the next day.

In April, Lewis issued a statement to CNN stating that voter fraud allegations against ACORN are “imaginary and false.”

In Missouri alone, at least 13 ACORN employees have pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to voter registration fraud over the last two years.

In response to Republican accusations, Lewis told C-SPAN on Oct. 12, 2008, “There’s a pattern of attacks, a pattern of allegations, but just because you repeat a lie, doesn’t make it true.” Lewis is the one repeating the lie. Not only is there an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the allegations of voter registration fraud, there are many ACORN employees who have been found guilty.

When CBS News’ Armen Keteyian asked Lewis if ACORN canvassers were given daily quotas for their “get out the vote” registration drives, Lewis answered “We pay people by the hour.”

Numerous ACORN workers have in fact come forward saying that ACORN does use quotas and even pressures their canvassers for more registrations.

“Every day, there was pressure on us. Every single day,” said Teshika Elder, an ACORN employee who worked with ACORN during the summer of 2008. “We had meetings every morning where they’d go over your quota; they’d yell at you if you were low,” said Elder. “They’d sit us down and say if you didn’t do better, they’d suspend you. They’d say, ‘Try harder next time,’ [and] if you didn’t get it, you’d be fired.”

An ACORN director – who asked to remain anonymous – confirmed to the New York Post that ACORN team leaders were required to submit 26 registrations per day, and canvassers needed 22.
The quota (that Lewis said is nonexistent) explains ACORN’s massive amount of suspect and phony registrations.

Lewis maintains that only a tiny fraction of their registrations are fraudulent.

However former ACORN affiliate Anita MonCrief testified before a grand jury in 2007 that ACORN considers an accuracy rating of 40 percent to be acceptable in their registration drives .
There are cases when ACORN doesn’t even meet the 40 percent threshold: During the 2007 election in King County, Washington, ACORN turned in 1,805 voter registrations. Only nine were legitimate. Lewis must have overlooked this fact when she told C-SPAN that “our quality control system works.”

Lewis and ACORN Executive Director Steve Kest wrote in October 2008 that “ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations.”

But an ACORN director told the New York Post in October 2008 that not all canvassers who submit fraudulent registrations are fired. “Those guys are still working at ACORN,” said the director, who did not want to be identified. “We know who they are; we’ve told them not to do it. But they weren’t among the people fired.”

Lewis also appeared on Fox Business Channel with Stuart Varney, where she made the claim that “Housing is a right” and that people are having their homes foreclosed on despite the fact that they are paying their mortgages.

Bertha Lewis – in true Goebbels fashion – repeats these lies at every opportunity in her media appearances. So when Bertha Lewis talks, how can we really believe anything that she says?