Democrats, election fraud go together

Two seemingly unrelated stories caught my attention.

In Reading, a worker from a group called ACORN was sentenced for submitting bogus voter registration applications.

In Philadelphia, three Democratic candidates are running scared because they may face criminal charges over allegations of forged signatures on nominating petitions.

Election fraud and Democrats seem to go together.

Two Philadelphia incumbent state House members - Tony J. Payton Jr. and Thomas W. Blackwell, both Democrats - are accused by opponents of turning in petitions with dozens of forged signatures, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lawrence M. Farnese Jr., one of four Democratic contenders for the state Senate seat now held by Vincent Fumo, is facing the same allegations, the newspaper says.

The reason Payton, Blackwell and Farnese are worried is because Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett announced last week he was filing criminal charges against former state Rep. Linda Bebko-Jones and her former chief of staff.

A state grand jury alleged that when Bebko-Jones was running for re-election in 2006, she and a staffer forged dozens of signatures on her nominating petitions, using an Erie County phone book and the lawmaker's personal address book to find the names, according to the newspaper.

This kind of fraud has been commonplace in Pennsylvania for decades, but incumbents have always been given the benefit of doubt. It's a new ballgame.

In addition to politicians and candidates cheating their way on the ballot, another favorite tactic of Democrats is to register people who are not eligible to vote. People who are dead. People who are not U.S. citizens. People are registered to vote in other states.

In a story from the Reading Eagle, a Berks County man working for ACORN, a left-leaning activist group that supports Democratic Party candidates, was sentenced to up to 23 months in prison for forging 29 voter-registration forms.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) pays people cash to register voters in many states. In every case, the people the group registers are Democrats. In some cases, those very same people are deceased or are illegal aliens or they've registered to vote several times in different places.

In the Berks County case, ACORN was attempting to register voters who opposed U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach, a Republican who represents Pennsylvania's 6th Congressional District.

ACORN officials claim they didn't know the registration forms were fraudulent when the forms were turned in to county elections officials.

Apparently, ACORN doesn't read newspapers or have access to the Internet, where organization officials can learn that ACORN has been implicated in voter fraud cases all over the country.

Type in "ACORN and voter fraud" on Google and you come up with 135,000 entries, including an editorial from The Wall Street Journal that makes this observation: "We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania."

I wrote about ACORN last November and questioned why the mainstream liberal media continues to ignore case after case of voter fraud tied to this pro-Democratic Party group.

This explains why so many Democrats and their supporters oppose tougher voter ID laws in this country. Preventing voter fraud would put Democratic Party candidates at a disadvantage. Winning is everything for Democrats, even if it means cheating.