I’ve been doing some research on the alleged ACORN voter fraud and have come across a lot of blogs tying Obama to it. I’m going to address the Obama aspect of the issue here and plan on doing another post to address the overall topic.

From the NYTimes:

Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign on Friday stepped up its efforts to tie Senator Barack Obama to a community organizing group that has been accused of involvement in problematic voter registrations in several hotly contested states
…
In 1995, Mr. Obama was on a team of lawyers that represented Acorn in a lawsuit to compel Illinois to comply with federal laws intended to enhance access to the polls. The team also represented Equip for Equality, a group that promotes the rights of the disabled, and four individuals. … the Justice Department was on the same side as Acorn in the lawsuit, as were other organizations, including the League of Women Voters.
…
Obama conducted two leadership training sessions of roughly an hour each for Acorn’s Chicago affiliate over a three-year period in the late 1990s. He was not paid for that work
…
In 1992, Mr. Obama was personally involved in voter registration efforts when he served as director of Project Vote in Chicago, helping to register 150,000 voters on the South Side. … Project Vote and Acorn were not as intertwined at that time as they are today, when a significant part of Project Vote’s revenues flow to Acorn and various of its affiliates as payment for services.

That’s pretty much the extent of Obama’s involvement with ACORN. I hardly think that any of these things point to the Obama campaign using ACORN to carry out voter fraud.

I think it’s important to point out that McCain and other Republicans have had positive interactions with ACORN in the past, too.

People who have been following these stories about Obama and ACORN might have noticed that I left out his campaign’s more than $800,000 payment to Citizens Services Inc. (which is an organization closely tied to ACORN). That’s because I wanted to get all of the trivial stuff out of the way. I think this payment is probably the only piece of evidence that can be used to tie Obama to ACORN’s recent activities. And frankly, I can’t find an explanation for it.

My point is that if you want to make some sort of connection between Obama and ACORN, there’s no need to pile on frivolous information -as many places have been- about Obama’s past work with them. Especially since McCain has worked with them as recently as 2006. There is also no need to ask rhetorical questions like “When Obama conducted those training sessions, what was he teaching them? Was he teaching them how to evade the law?” All that does is paint Obama as a criminal, when there is no evidence to support such a picture. Let’s examine the cold hard (and relevent) facts about Obama’s current ties to ACORN.

The questions I am left with are: Did any of that $800,000 paid to Citizen Services, Inc. go to fund ACORN’s activities in Colorado, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, or Ohio? If so, did Obama’s campaign know about it?

Of course, I haven’t yet come to too many conclusions about ACORN’s activities themselves. So, the degree to which all of this really concerns me is to be determined.