An acorn fell in Ohio

We may and should distinguish between vote fraud and voter-registration fraud, or mistakes.  The phone registrants may not vote.  Then again, they may, and if there are a lot of them, as in Ohio this election, we should look for vote fraud.

Here’s John Fund on the issue in the 10/30/08 WSJ.com’s Political Diary:

[Karen] Gillette [ACORN’s Project Vote head fund-raiser] certainly deserves more scrutiny [in the matter of trolling for money among maxed-out Obama donors supplied by the Obama campaign]. In 2006, she was a campaign consultant for Jennifer Brunner, the Acorn-backed Democratic candidate for Ohio secretary of state. Since her election, Ms. Brunner has outraged Republicans and left many objective observers puzzled by her judgment calls.

Some 660,000 new voter registrations have been filed in Ohio this year by groups including Acorn, and more than 200,000 failed a “match up” test in which voter information was compared with driver’s license and Social Security databases. Despite these warning signs, Ms. Brunner refused to allow county officials access to information they needed to verify the newly registered voters.

Many of the new registrants cast ballots earlier this month in Ohio’s “Golden Week,” a seven-day period when state residents can register and immediately cast an absentee ballot. At least half a dozen cases have been documented of people illegally registering and casting ballots during “Golden Week.”

Republicans seeking to force Secretary Brunner to surrender the data have been stymied in court, but their hand may be strengthened by the latest revelation that Ms. Brunner’s campaign consultant has close ties with Acorn’s Project Vote and has been accused under oath of obtaining donor lists from the Obama campaign to drum up dollars for Acorn’s voter registration effort — including its large Ohio operation.

If Ohio goes for Obama by a slim margin, the courts may be busier than polling places have been, says Fund, here paraphrased.