In August, City Hall published an investigative report explaining the operations of the Working Families Party’s for-profit company, Data & Field Services. In early September, after conducting its own review, the New York City Campaign Finance Board officially declared that “DFS exists as an arm of the Working Families Party.” Over the last three months, City Hall has continued the investigation, relying on dozens of interviews with people within and outside the organization, in addition to a review of tax, lobbying and campaign finance records, as well as confidential internal documents.

Following weeks of in-depth inquiries from City Hall, the Working Families Party announced on Nov. 6 that it was hiring the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom to conduct a review of its practices, with the effort to be led by Judith Kaye, the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.

“It has always been our intent to engage in a thorough post-election analysis of our structure,” read an open memo from the Party’s executive director, Dan Cantor, and two of the co-chairs of the executive committee which contained several paragraphs previously provided in answers to City Hall inquiries. “Now that Election Day is behind us, the firm will begin that review and recommend any necessary changes, improvements or modifications that Judge Kaye and her colleagues believe necessary to ensure maximum transparency and continued adherence to the highest legal and ethical standards.”

What follows are the findings of City Hall’s investigation into what few seem to realize: the political party and Data & Field Services are not the only two arms of the Working Families. There are, in fact, four arms: a political party, a for-profit and two different kinds of non-profits, each of which is separate and distinct under the law.

This five-part examination by City Hall into the Working Families Party’s accounting methods and finances has shown that together through these four arms, the Working Families has the benefits of a political party (legitimacy in voters’ minds, ballot line), a non-profit (tax-exemptions, uncapped donation limits and tax deductions) and a for-profit (no disclosure requirements, ability to collect fees backed by taxpayer-supported matching funds from candidates).

Over the last decade, the Working Families Party has become a dominating force in New York politics by using the state’s fusion voting law (one of only a few in the nation) to give candidates a second line to run on and, more importantly, by throwing its weight behind candidates in Democratic primaries all over the state at a time when the state Democratic Party has been suffering.

And never was the Party stronger than in this year’s elections: come inauguration day on Jan. 1, New York City will have a public advocate, city comptroller and almost a fifth of the City Council who owe their seats and their control over city finances and legislation in large part to its efforts.

This has led to a new reality in New York politics: winning the support of the Working Families Party is now arguably the most important step to getting elected, because it has become the key to winning Democratic primaries. The Party offers what many fans call the “progressive Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” a certification in the minds of voters that they are the stand-out candidates, good people who are out to do good.

But in interviews with dozens of politicians, political operatives and seasoned observers of New York politics (most of them Democrats whose political views align largely with the Working Families’), about what has been discovered over the past three months—by way of the City Hall stories, the Campaign Finance Board ruling and the recent lawsuit against Data & Field Services—City Hall has found concerns raised about the Working Families. And, they say, after being presented with the information on tax, lobbying and campaign finance records that were part of this investigation, more concerns were raised.

While standing for ethics in government and campaign finance reform, Working Families has non-profits groups and a for-profit entity that lack donation caps, disclosure requirements (in terms of frequency and detail) and other regulations that political parties face. Leading politicians, political operatives and other experts complain that Party-supported candidates are as a result given an unfair advantage over their rivals. These people, who asked not to be identified for fear of alienating the increasingly powerful party and who were wary of speaking on the record about legal issues, believe that what they know of the novel Working Families way of doing business contradicts the reforms the Party and its candidates tend to support.

City Hall has also obtained the organizational rules, a confidential explanatory memo and other materials about the internal Working Families voting process which detail a system of weighting votes based on money for endorsements and nominations. These indicate that the more money a union contributes to the legally separate, non-profit (the Working Families Organization), the more votes the union gets in the Working Families Organization’s New York City Coordinating Council—which multiple interviews, emails from a top party staffer and the Working Families Party’s own press releases identify as the decision making body for the Working Families Party in deciding which candidates to back.

Founded in 1998 by activists and union leaders eager to give labor and left-wing politics a greater voice, the Working Families Party has long advocated for the kind of agenda liberal New Yorkers tend to support: responsible development, worker protections, greening the economy and tax laws that hit the wealthy more than the middle class. Aiming to pull the Democratic Party away from the center, the Party has developed into a political home for many who believe in bettering society and a new kind of politics. Its support has become so desirable that candidates are willing to fill out extensive questionnaires which ask for their stances on nearly every issue, request that the Party gets consultation power on all local development deals and that campaigns pay for mailers promoting the Party.

Then there is the Working Families Organization, founded in 2006 by the top leadership of the Working Families Party. A non-profit with a 501(c)4 designation that gives it tax exemptions usually reserved for social welfare groups, the Working Families Organization is also the lobbyist with the eighth-highest ranking of expenditures last year in the state—and the only one of those that can offer an increasingly powerful ballot line as an incentive for promoting its agenda on specific issues.

Then there is Data & Field Services, the political consulting company founded in 2007 by the Working Families Party. With the results of the 2009 elections, Data & Field Services has one of the best win records in New York among local political consulting companies and, aside from the consulting companies contracted by the Bloomberg campaign, it was also one of the highest billing. The company sells its canvassing, polling, database, voter file and get-out-the-vote services only to the Working Families Party and its favored candidates.

Then there is the Progressive America Fund, a non-profit that has 501(c)3 tax-exempt designation that bars it from any partisan or overtly political activity. The Fund predates the other Working Families entities. One of the Fund’s two main arms is the Center for Working Families, a think tank. The Center provides many of the position papers that are given to candidates looking to get the Working Families Party endorsements. These are also the policy papers which form the foundation of the Working Families Organization’s lobbying efforts. The other main Progressive America Fund project is the National Open Ballot Project, which is geared toward supporting efforts to get cross-endorsement fusion voting legalized elsewhere across the country, and has helped foster nascent Working Families parties in up to 10 other states.

According to tax, campaign finance and other records, all four arms have been based in one office on the third floor of 2-4 Nevins Street in Brooklyn. The three co-chairs of the Working Families Party—Bob Master, Sam Williams and Bertha Lewis—were, along with now-White House political director Patrick Gaspard (a founding board member of the Party), the initial directors of the Working Families Organization, and their ongoing positions give them control over Data & Field Services. They were also, as of 2005, the respective president, secretary and treasurer of the Progressive America Fund. Dan Cantor, the executive director of the Party and of the Organization, oversees Data & Field Services, and is a former board member of the Progressive America Fund. According to records, they are not alone: nearly every person listed as an employee of one of these entities is also listed as an employee of at least one of the others. People who have visited the offices say they see no clear distinctions between desks, resources, staff and leadership.

When asked about this structure, the Working Families Party denies that there is anything wrong with what it is doing, or that its operations are at all unusual.

“It is extremely common that different organizations organized pursuant to different sets of laws co-exist—often in the same space with overlapping staff working closely together in advancing their various missions,” said Party spokesman Dan Levitan.

Among those entities Levitan cited as a prime example of similar overlaps are the environmental groups under the umbrella of the Sierra Club classified as 501 (c)3, 501 (c)4, Political Action Committee and for-profit. But the Sierra Club cannot give anyone a spot on the ballot, as the Working Families Party can. This is what makes the Working Families different from all the other examples Levitan and other Working Families staff presented, which include NARAL and the Brennan Center.

Tax, election law and campaign finance experts in New York, Albany and Washington, though, say the finances and personnel of the Working Families family appear so intertwined as to raise questions about this structure.

Allen Bromberger, a New York City attorney at Perlman Perlman who has spent 20 years specializing in “hybrid” legal structures that incorporate non-profits with other entities, was struck by the details of the Working Families structure.

“I’ve never seen this kind of a set-up before,” he said.

“In order to pass muster at IRS, as far as I’m concerned, all the accounting and the bookkeeping and the allocation of costs would have to be done in a very diligent manner. Even then I think it could still be problematic,” he added. “It may be okay—they may have designed it carefully and put enough safeguards in place—but the primary purpose of the 501(c)4 cannot be to engage in political activities. So if they’re not able to show some substantial non-political activity by the 501(c)4, I think they’ve got a pretty significant problem.”

City Hall’s entire Part I of the series can be read here.

OKlahoma Power Plan –

The “Power Plan” is a very interesting document. First, it provides another example for how ACORN’s political operation thinks strategically. The plan is focused on impacting state legislative races to create momentum and a power base to affect political races next year.

The second interesting feature of the document is how overtly partisan it is. At the beginning of the document, ACORN makes clear its goal is to put the Democrats in charge of the state Legislature:

Second, become an influential organization by shaping a handful of strategic legislative districts that, by themselves, can change who controls the state legislature.  In other words, by taking credit for controlling some swing seats that return state senate power to progressives in 2008 and the state house to progressives in 2010, ACORN may not have members in a majority of districts, but we will be seen as the force that is making Oklahoma a progressive state in the way that it was 100 years ago.

By using this power to win significant changes for working people, by the end of our 5 years, we will have legitimized the progressive takeover of the statehouse and head into 2012 with a real possibility of changing what Oklahomans look for and expect out of their Congressional delegation.

Consider this analysis from its top political priority, OK state Senate district #43, held by GOP Senator Jim Reynolds:

The district’s south half will prove difficult, with more Anglo, Republican, and military families.  The half to the north will be more fruitful.  The entire district is working class, however, so it could respond uniformly to the right issue.  This is the one of ACORN’s two targeted districts with a minority population above 25%

According to a report from Ohio today, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has asked the ACORN-tainted Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, to investigation ACORN’s voter registration work in the state.

“U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan has formally asked Ohio’s secretary of state to look into allegations that ACORN had at least a preliminary plan to back Democrat candidates in key Ohio congressional races in 2008.”

The political plan was described in an October article as “having been scaled back,” and of course, ACORN denied any partisan activity.

“But to some, ACORN’s early 13-page plan for the 2008 election reinforces what critics always assumed: The group’s goal was never nonpartisan. The political plan and other ACORN documents show that the group was interested not just in helping presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom it urged its members to support, according to post-election Federal Election Commission reports. ACORN also was interested in Congress and the Ohio Statehouse.

“There’s no question that ACORN strategized to figure out how its election efforts could maximize the benefit for selected Democratic candidates in the most competitive races,” U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa of California told The Plain Dealer. “

An illuminating  fact not mentioned in either article is that ACORN prepared political plans for several key battleground states in 2006 and again during the 2007-08 election cycle. As evidenced by the draft plans developed in the Spring of 2006 by the Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD) of ACORN Political Operations, these plans were aimed at electing “progressives” and in some cases broke down the Congressional districts by race for maximum targeting. SWORD, which was staffed by Project Vote employees, including myself, worked with ACORN head organizers in FL, MD, MI, MN, OH, PA, and RI to create local documents for the ACORN field staff to implement and present to funders and/or various partner organizations.

A copy of the Maryland and Colorado draft plans from 2006 are available online. Key parts of the plans are the contact and Congressional district sections at the end. For example, in the Maryland plan, it calls for mailings and face to face contact. A screen shot of the type of mailing Marylanders received is shown below.

ACORN used Project Vote staff and computers to create the PowerPoint “Campaign for a New Congress.” This PowerPoint was aimed at swaying the Congressional election in Maryland from Albert Wynn to ACORN ally Donna Edwards. Using the final political plan, ACORN canvassed voters and mailed pieces through its affiliate Communities Voting Together.

Communities Voting Together has the same address as the Project Vote office in DC and its address on the screen shot above is the same Elysian Fields address where hundreds of other ACORN entities “reside.

As a 527 group, Communities Voting Together paid over 150,000 to Citizen’s Services Inc, and contributed to Wade Rathke’s Chief Organizer Fund. Jeff Robinson is listed as the contact for Communities Voting Together and some may remembered Robinson from the 2008 elections (emphasis mine):

“In fact, the Obama campaign paid an ACORN-run organization more than $800,000. In Federal Election Commission required filings, the Obama campaign reported that this money was paid for polling, advance work and event staging. After watchdog scrutiny called this claim into question, the Obama campaign revised its filing and acknowledged that CSI was paid for “get-out-the-vote” projects.

CSI Executive Vice President Jeff Robinson last August told Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter David M. Brown that CSI is a ’separate organization entirely’ from ACORN. But as Brown reported, CSI has the same office address as ACORN’s national headquarters, ACORN itself described CSI in 2006 as its ‘campaign services entity.’ Coincidentally, the widely identified “national deputy political director for campaigns and elections” for ACORN is…Jeff Robinson.”

ACORN’s shell corporations make it easy for a political plan to become a partisan voter registration drive facilitated by thin veiled “partnerships.” The filing reports of Communities Voting Together raise a number of questions, including whether the misspelling of the name on the filing was intentional. The payments to various ACORN entities should give any astute lawmaker pause.

ACORN has been able to claim that it never worked in some recent elections including NY-23, but as this screen shoot illustrates, Communities Voting together was mailing and passing out door knockers in 2006 for Corzine in New Jersey (without a mention of ACORN).

Will ACORN backed officials like Jennifer Brunner (who has her eye on a Senate seat) and officials in Maryland and Colorado take notices of these obvious attempts to elect Democrats, or will they continue to turn a blind eye to ACORN in order to save themselves?