In this week’s campaign legal dust-up, Barack Obama and fellow Democratic senators complained that Republicans in Michigan want to disenfranchise voters who have lost their homes to foreclosure, on the grounds that they would not have legal residences. But if the Democrats hope to be taken seriously, they need to sever their ties with questionable groups that have been helping their voter registration efforts. Chief among them: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), both of which are enmeshed in scandal.
The Obama campaign has paid at least $800,000 to an ACORN affiliate for campaign work, and Obama himself has a long history of working with the organization despite the fact that ACORN has a deplorable record of turning in fraudulent voter registrations. Investigations of ACORN groups reportedly are pending in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and ACORN workers were convicted in Washington State last year for what Washington’s Secretary of State called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history.” The Detroit Free Press reported just last week that “a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications” had been coming into registrars across Michigan and that “the majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN.”
Then there is the SEIU, which threw its organizational muscle behind Obama back in February. Since then, Obama has relied on SEIU to turn out his vote. Just last week, the SEIU was running anti-McCain TV advertisements as an “independent expenditure.” Although Obama once pledged to try to dissuade such outside ads, he now seems to welcome SEIU’s contribution to his campaign.
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles reportedly has opened a probe into a major spending scandal at SEIU that has forced three union officials to leave their positions. The House Education and Labor Committee also is conducting an investigation, but Republicans on the committee say that Democratic committee chairman George Miller is dragging his feet. And that’s far from the only controversy at SEIU: Its president, Andy Stern, has been the implicated in criminal investigations as far back as 1998. The solution is simple: Obama ought to make clear that he wants nothing to do with any organization riven by corruption.
