Hoosiers turn out in masses for Obama rally
LAKE COUNTY | Election officials accuse ACORN of fraudulently signing up 2,500 new voters
INDIANAPOLIS -- Here's how serious the Democrats are about taking Indiana's 11 electoral votes for the first time since 1964:
As many as 21,000 Hoosiers turned out in the rain Wednesday to cheer on Barack Obama at the state fairgrounds.
(AP)
But in Lake County, Ind., a nonprofit group Obama once represented as a lawyer, ACORN, filed an estimated 2,500 fraudulent voter registrations in the past two weeks, county election officials say.
Indianapolis and Gary gave Obama his highest vote totals in the Indiana primary, along with college towns such as South Bend and Bloomington.
Indiana has been regarded as safely Republican for 44 years, but some polls show Obama tied with John McCain.
In Lake County, as in other parts of the country, Obama backers say they have signed up thousands of voters inspired by Obama. ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has participated in many of those registration drives. Some Republicans have charged that ACORN members engage in vote fraud. In Las Vegas, federal officials raided ACORN's offices Tuesday as part of a vote-fraud investigation.
In Lake County, 18,000 new voters have registered in the last two weeks, about 5,000 of them signed up by ACORN, said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county's board of elections. As they started making verification calls on the ACORN registrations, employees found about half were false, she said. One was for a Mr. Johns Jimmy at the address of a Jimmy John's sandwich shop in Crown Point. Some registrants were dead.
Hoagland said one ACORN official told her that the employees who filed the fraudulent registrations have been fired. ACORN officials could not be reached for comment. Republican officials have taken the issue to federal court.
Obama successfully represented ACORN in Chicago in its effort to protect the law that allows people to register to vote when they get their driver's licenses. Obama's campaign had no comment on ACORN's current difficulties.