Notorious ACORN aiding Sestak campaign

Action United, which is also conducting a GOTV drive, only took its present name a few months ago. When it was incorporated at the beginning of the year it registered as Pennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change (PCOC).

Lucille Prater-Holliday of Pittsburgh was listed as an initial director in the incorporation papers of both PNSJ and PCOC, both ostensibly nonpartisan organizations. She ran in the 2008 Democratic primary for the 24th legislative district in the state House.

The group has already secured funding from the far-left Tides Foundation headed by Drummond Pike. Pike is treasurer of the Democracy Alliance, a financial clearinghouse for results-oriented left-wing philanthropy. The group is dominated by radical philanthropist George Soros, Progressive Insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, and financiers Herb and Marion Sandler. That couple sold their financial institution to Wachovia Bank which later collapsed under the weight of the Sandlers’ doomed subprime mortgage investments. “Saturday Night Live” mocked the ACORN benefactors as “people who should be shot” after the stock market collapsed in September 2008.

Confused? ACORN’s critics say that’s exactly the idea. ACORN maintains odd business practices and byzantine organizational arrangements in order to escape public scrutiny, they say. The fact that ACORN moves money and employees around the ACORN network like pawns in a chess game makes the group very difficult to investigate.

Meanwhile, inside sources say Project Vote is deliberately maintaining a low profile in the current election cycle and plans to return in full force for the 2012 reelection campaign of President Obama, who led a legendary Project Vote voter drive in 1992.

Earlier this year, this writer was told that Project Vote was having a banner year despite ACORN’s troubles and may be raking in more money than in 2008 when it reported receiving $14.6 million in contributions and grants.

The individual running Project Vote’s GOTV operation is under indictment for felony voter registration fraud.

ACORN’s voter drive is being run by Amy Busefink, a senior ACORN executive whose conspiracy trial begins Nov. 29 in Las Vegas. Prosecutors say Busefink allowed an illegal compensation scheme known as “Blackjack” or “21+” to operate. The program gave voter registration canvassers a financial bonus for surpassing the daily quota. Her subordinate, Christopher Edwards, has pleaded guilty in the plot and is scheduled to testify against his former boss.

Busefink also oversaw ACORN’s 2008 voter registration program that garnered more than a million voter applications. The problem is 400,000 of those applications “were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions,” the New York Times reported.