WHETHER or not Barack Obama wins election tomorrow, his campaign has exposed some gaping weaknesses in the electoral process - and some even more serious problems with today’s mass media. The question is whether the political establishment will be willing to do anything about them.
On the electoral side, we’ve seen allegations of massive voter fraud, often backed up by actual arrests and investigations. The FBI has opened an investigation into the Obama-friendly group ACORN, which has been associated with fraudulent registrations and other misconduct in many jurisdictions.
In Indiana, CNN noted, of 5,000 registrations turned in, the first 2,000 turned out to be fraudulent. In Kansas City, officials found hundreds of bogus registrations. CNN also reported on the case of Clifton Mitchell, an ex-ACORN worker who served time in prison for voter fraud.
In Pennsylvania, ACORN worker Jemar Barksdale was arrested for voter fraud involving fake registrations. Meanwhile, the state of Ohio turned up 200,000 questionable voter registrations, but Ohio officials went to court to avoid having to respond. In Michigan, an ACORN worker has been charged with forgery. ACORN activists even tried to register Mickey Mouse to vote in Florida.
Indianapolis, meanwhile - along with some counties in Alabama and Mississippi - turned out to have more registrants than actual live voters. And in Connecticut, a group of journalism students discovered 8,500 dead people still on the rolls, people whose identities could be used to cast fraudulent ballots.
As The Post reported, ACORN also managed to register a 7-year-old girl to vote in Bridgeport, while in Nevada ACORN filed registrations in the names of Dallas Cowboys and had its offices raided by Nevada authorities. In Florida, more than 30,000 ineligible felons were registered to vote.
But it’s not just voters who are questionable. While the vote-fraud stories were running, the Obama campaign - after Obama broke a promise to stick with public financing - was setting fund-raising records and bragging about its grass-roots donations. It turned out to have a system for credit-card processing that could hardly have been better suited to enabling financial fraud.
Unlike other campaigns, Obama’s staff disabled the “Address Verification System” that checks credit-card numbers against addresses to ensure their validity. The result was that people could make multiple donations under different names using the same card, in violation of reporting requirements and donation limits.
And there was nothing to stop foreign nationals from donating directly to the Obama campaign. As Scott Johnson noted in this newspaper, “No presidential campaign has ever before received such a gargantuan sum of money from unidentified contributors.”
An investigation by National Journal reporter Neil Munro found that the McCain campaign Web site didn’t allow anonymous donations, while the Obama Web site did.
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