Ohio election law prohibits convicted felons from working as petition workers, yet 47 felons have been discovered as employees of SmokeFree America in its Ohio effort. Of these felons several were convicted of rape, one accused of raping a child. Alarmingly, SmokeFree America exposed Ohio residents to rapists who were collecting their signatures and addresses! There were also forgers and thieves collecting signatures and addresses of Ohio residents. Other criminal actions by petition workers: arson, burglary, breaking and entering, weapons violations, kidnapping, drug violations, drug trafficking, grand theft, etc.

The petitions also had multiple violations of Ohio election law. Some petitions were signed by those paid to circulate the petitions — a violation of the law — and their addresses were given as hotels instead of the required permanent home addresses. Also some were out-of-state signatories instead of Ohio residents.

There were also multiple violations of petition worker’s reporting forms (form 15s). In some cases petition workers didn’t file any form 15s at all, in other cases the form was filed after petitions were counted as valid, and in still other cases, the petition workers did not properly list the petition company they were working for on the form 15s reports. In each and every case, petitions should have been thrown out that were collected by paid petition workers who did not file a legal and correct form 15s yet these petitions were not invalidated by state officials.

Further, there were serious mathematical errors in tabulating the final count of valid signatures and many of the invalid petitions were counted as legitimate. Thousands of signatures were legally invalid but were accepted by the Ohio Secretary of State’s office anyway.

Finally, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office approved the inclusion of Issue five 20 days before the petitions were received — as incorrect as they are — and almost a month before they were approved as valid. This means the Sec. of State approved of the ballot initiative before authorities even had determined that SmokeFree America had satisfied the legal requirements to qualify for inclusion on the ballot.

It seems patently clear that the Ohio Secretary of State’s office had determined to add issue five to the ballot whether or not all legal challenges were satisfied.

Local Ohio business owner Pam Parker goes over some of the violations and numbers in a recent video:

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?