RUTHFULLY YOURS

An ACORN offshoot and other left-wing pressure groups are suing California in federal court because the state hasn’t made it easy enough for Democrats to flood voter rolls with illegal aliens and foreign nationals who aren’t legally eligible to vote.

Throughout the years Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins, and celebrities living and dead were registered to vote because now-defunct ACORN and its allied groups were allowed to pollute the voter rolls.

The ACORN successor group known as ACCE Institute, League of Women Voters of California, California Common Cause, and the National Council of La Raza want to compel the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to incorporate voter registration material into the forms needed to apply for or renew a driver’s license or state identification card, or submit a change of address. They claim the DMV is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), popularly called “Motor-Voter,” by asking the more than a million California residents who renew by mail every year to fill out a separate voter registration form.

Other election fraud-promoting state policies already exist in the Golden State, which is a haven for illegal aliens and illegal voting.

In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law to register all eligible holders of driver’s licenses as voters unless they “opt out.” The Los Angeles Times reports that law “was on hold until state elections officials completed testing of a statewide voter database. That process ended last year, and the automated process for registering voters is expected to be used before next year’s elections.”

But that still doesn’t provide enough opportunities for non-citizens to vote in California to satisfy whiny so-called voting rights advocates in the already solidly Democrat state.

“Since we first alerted DMV to these problems, multiple local, state, and federal elections have passed, including the 2016 presidential election,” said ACCE Executive Director Christina Livingston. “Enough is enough. It’s time for California to make registration easier for every voter as the law requires and to get it done before another election passes us by.”

In court papers, ACCE Institute claims ACCE has 14,000 members, as well as offices in Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Diego. The group claims in 2016 that ACCE ran five programs that registered almost 10,000 Californians to vote. ACCE Institute describes itself as “a non-profit community organization that helps California citizens organize and take action to promote change that benefits social, economic, and racial justice.”

Because the state supposedly hasn’t been following federal law, ACCE claims it “has been forced to and continues to expend resources to promote voter registration in California that ACCE would otherwise have used to further other organizational goals.”

What might those “other organizational goals” be? The California branch of ACORN was adept at dumping garbage in the lobbies of banks, surrounding the homes of corporate executives and frightening their families, and providing rent-a-mobs for wealthy benefactors such as banking tycoons Herb and Marion Sandler.

The plaintiff groups are being represented by the ACLU of Northern California, Demos, and the law firm of Morrison and Foerster. ACORN-affiliated Project Vote had also been providing legal representation but it recently closed its doors.

ACCE Institute is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm of ACCE, which stands for Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. ACCE is the successor group to ACORN California, which, with 37,000 dues-paying members, was one of the largest state chapters in the ACORN network. ACCE was founded by ACORN officials in December 2009 before ACORN Inc., the parent nonprofit at the head of the network, filed for bankruptcy in November 2010. ACORN had been battered in 2008 by the revelation of a million-dollar embezzlement by the founder’s brother which management covered up, and by undercover videos shot in 2009 by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles showing ACORN intake workers helping to facilitate tax fraud and prostitution. Soon after, Congress cut off funding to ACORN.

ACCE paid $9,000 to purchase ACORN California computers and office equipment. It also bought the rights to ACORN’s donor databases. The office address of ACCE and ACCE Institute is 3655 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. That address was the address of ACORN California’s headquarters, too.

ACORN is congenitally corrupt.

As I documented in Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, at least 54 ACORN employees and individuals associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud, a blanket term coined by lawyers referring to fraudulent voting, identify fraud, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, and other crimes related to the electoral process.

In August 2011, ACORN was fined the maximum of $5,000 in Las Vegas for its role in a massive voter fraud conspiracy. Judge Donald Mosley said he would have handed down a 10-year prison sentence if an individual rather than a corporation had been before him: “And I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.” Mosley criticized ACORN for making a “mockery” of America’s electoral process. “This isn’t a banana republic,” he said.

ACORN had pled guilty to felony-level unlawful compensation for registration of voters. With the full knowledge of upper management, ACORN illegally offered cash bonuses to its voter registration canvassers in a scheme called “Blackjack.” Canvassers received extra money if they registered 21 voters a day. Senior ACORN executives Amy Adele Busefink and Christopher Howell Edwards were also convicted for their roles in the scheme. ACORN cared so little about the conspiracy that Project Vote, its voter mobilization division, put Busefink in charge of the group’s national get-out-the-vote drive in 2010 while she was under indictment in Nevada. Project Vote announced it was shutting its doors on May 31 of this year.

The federal Motor-Voter statute so revered by the Left was the brainchild of Sixties radicals Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. It was enacted in 1993. President Clinton thanked the couple by name for their efforts and gave them prime seating at the bill-signing ceremony.

The idea behind the law was to make it ridiculously easy to register to vote in the hope that millions of people not legally eligible to vote would nevertheless find their way onto voter rolls. That law turned welfare offices and DMVs across the country into voter registration centers and encouraged nonprofit groups to conduct registration drives. It also opened the door to the massive voter fraud that is commonplace today.

Cloward and Piven explained their strategy in a 1983 article titled “Toward a Class-Based Realignment of American Politics: A Movement Strategy,” which ran in ACORN’s magazine, Social Policy.

[E]nlisting millions of new and politicized voters is the way to create an electoral environment hospitable to fundamental change in American society. An enlarged and politicized electorate will sustain and encourage the movements in American society that are already working for the rights of women and minorities, for the protection of the social programs, and for transformation of foreign policy. Equally important, an enlarged and politicized electorate will foster and protect future mass movements from the bottom that the ongoing economic crisis is likely to generate, thus opening American politics to solutions to the economic crisis that express the interests of the lower strata of the population … The objective is to accelerate the dealigning forces already at work in American politics, and to promote party realignment along class lines.

The goal behind Motor-Voter wasn’t to make America’s electoral processes function more smoothly. The goal was left-wing revolution.

The lawsuit filed by ACCE Institute and its allies is in keeping with that goal.