Jacoby, Poisner and Sproul

By Denis Campbell

Acorn Investigate It! Acorn Investigate It! Acorn Investigate It! Was a popular mantra on the trail until it was suddenly silenced yesterday and over the weekend by the arrests and then linking back of to two Republican operatives in the employ of the McCain campaign on real vote suppression and slamming fraud.

Remember last week when McCain talked about Acorn as “a grave threat to the very fabric of our Democracy?” How Acorn registered fiction al voters and were committing voter fraud? Now they are silent.

It seems the McCain campaign has funded two firms that have indeed conducted fraud and disenfranchised very real voters. Mark Jacoby was arrested in Ontario California on two counts of perjury and two counts of vote fraud. Seems he registered a fake address in California to get around the state’s restriction on conducting voter registration drives only if you are indeed a resident to, ostensibly, prevent the kind of fraud he was perpetrating. His company was called YPM. Nop stranger to legal troubles, prosecutors in LA, Ventura and San Bernardino counties all have questions for Mr. Jacoby.

Seems he likes to engage in practice called slamming where he takes voter registration info and ensures that they are registered as Republicans whether they choose that party or not since they only get paid for registering (wait for it) Republicans… So 80% of all ballots received were Republican whther that was true of not.

Why? Because a madman in Republican circles Steve Poisner is offering a $5 per registration bounty – kind of like a poker cash/knockout bounty – per voter. Mr. Poisner, is State Chair for (wait for it..) the McCain Campaign. Senator McCain cannot claim ignorance of this because YPM and Jacoby are based in his home state of Arizona. YPM have been busy. They also were accused of fraud in 2004 in Florida and Massachusetts.

As if that was not enough, enter Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Republican Party. He has been ignoring whistle-blowers and stands accused of tearing up Democratic registration in Oregon, Nevada, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Real registrations of real voters who thought they were registered and very wel may have been denied to right to vote in the real election of 2004.

The McCain connection? They funded Sproul to register voters to the tune of $175,000 dollars to the Lincoln Strategies Group of which Nathan Sprewell is the owner (ooops).

Seems the Bush Administration’s Justice Department has been stonewalling and dragging it’s heels on an investigation of Sprewell as asked for by John Conyers, Democratic Chair of the Judiciary Committee, but moved with incredible speed on the Acorn allegations prompting Senator Obama’s counsel last week to ask for the appointment of a special prosecutor to see if there is a double standard at work here.

Seeing as there already is a special prosecutor looking into the Justice department firing of attorneys failing to follow a party line prosecution in these cases, I guess she can also look into these charges easily. 

The Republicans call this an excellent wedge issue and urge all party members to use it wherever possible… you think?

Campaigning cannot be fun in McCain’s internet free world view. He used to be able to just do this stuff with impunity… a few more teeth were ground to dust this morning in silence.