High priced vote fraud scam

Byron York:

On Wednesday, the Federal Election Commission slapped America Coming Together with a $775,000 fine — the third-largest such penalty in history — for violating campaign-finance laws in the 2004 election. Now largely defunct, America Coming Together was the biggest of the so-called “527” groups that took in millions from donors like George Soros for the purpose of defeating George W. Bush. In a case that has taken years to decide, the FEC ruled that America Coming Together did an end-run around the campaign-finance laws in 2004 by claiming it was using its money for non-partisan purposes like voter registration when it was in fact spending millions specifically targeting Bush.

I included a chapter on America Coming Together in my 2005 book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. During my research, in the months before the 2004 election, everyone seemed to know that America Coming Together was openly flouting the rules, but everyone also knew that the group would get away with it until long after the election. And so it did, with the FEC taking until August 2007 to make a ruling. What follows are excerpts from the book — the chapter’s title was “Shell Game” — detailing just what America Coming Together did.


In July 2004, in a conference room on the second floor of the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel near Boston Common, Steve Rosenthal was explaining what might be called the Palm Pilot theory of voter contact. A former political chief of the AFL-CIO, Rosenthal had come to the Democratic National Convention in his role as chief executive officer of America Coming Together, or ACT, the biggest of the “independent” 527 groups working to defeat George W. Bush. ACT did the hard, street-level job of political organizing; other groups like MoveOn might spend time producing Internet attack ads or holding virtual bake sales, but ACT was actually getting in touch with vot­ers, one-by-one and face-to-face, trying to convince them to vote for John Kerry. The work, as Rosenthal explained it, was part shoe leather and part personal digital assistant.

”The system that we’re developing is old as time, but with a modern twist,” Rosenthal told a small group of reporters. ACT had thousands of canvassers spread across the swing states, he explained, and each canvasser was equipped with a Palm Pilot loaded with a software program developed by a pro-Democratic firm called VAN, which stood for Voter Activation Network. When the canvasser turned on the Palm, up popped a list of voters whom ACT wanted him to visit, a map showing him how to get to their homes, and a script of what he was to say once he arrived.

Rosenthal sketched out an example of how the system worked. A canvasser knocks on a door and asks a voter which issue concerns him most. The voter says the economy. The canvasser asks what it is about the economy that the voter finds most worrisome. The voter says low wages. The canvasser enters all this into the Palm, which already has a full file of commercial and demographic information about the voter. If the voter is a Democrat, the canvasser asks if he’ll help the cause by volunteering to knock on some doors, or at least agree to read some “information” from ACT. If the voter says yes, he then begins to receive a stream of customized mailings and e-mails from ACT, focusing on the key problem facing America today, which is, of course, low wages.

...

There is much more, but it gives you something of a feel for why the Democrats are so concerned about having US Attorneys who will prosecute vote fraud. This is why they have pushed a bogus investigation into the firing of some who were not aggressively pursuing the fraud investigations. This gives you a hint of the massive cover up that Leahy and Schumer are pushing with their bogus investigation.