This is absolutely crazy.
According to the LA Times, Mark Jacoby has been arrested for voter registration fraud.
More importantly, this is not the first time that this individual committed this same fraud and the Republican National Committee was aware of his history and hired him again!
People need to know the much broader scope of this issue!
More Below The Fold. (Updated See Below!)
This is a short diary, but the story needs to be pushed.
For all of the accusations against Acorn, it's the Republicans that get arrested for switching people illegally from Democrat to Republican.
It seems that unlike Acorn, Mr. Jacoby was paid for registrations, approximately $7 to $12 per registrant.
This was covered last week by the LA Times in this article.
But this is not the first time, according to the St. Petersburg Times, the Republican party in 2004 hired Mr. Jacoby through another firm and he ran the same scam then--and they knew about it and hired him again for this election.
His strategy was to go onto college campuses and get students to sign a petition for stiffer penalties for child abuse or relaxed regulation on Marijuana and then forge their registration after the individual completed the petition. The petition was a fraud, but the registration was then real.
According to the St. Petersburg Times:
The prime suspect is a group hired by the National Republican Committee to register voters... Young Political Majors LLC, or YPM, is a company registered by Mark Jacoby at a Town 'N Country residence.
Jacoby appeared this summer at the election office in Gainesville with a box of about 1,200 voter registration cards. Of those, about 510 voters had switched to the GOP.
Elections Supervisor Beverly Hill spoke with Jacoby and grew suspicious. She randomly called the Republicans to verify they wanted to switch. All of them said, "Absolutely not," Hill said. "They didn't even know they had signed a registration form," Hill said.
Jacoby could not be reached for comment. His company worked for a company called JSM Inc., which in turn worked for Arno Political Consultants, a Sacramento, Calif., firm that qualified 300 ballot initiatives in 20 states.
The firm's largely conservative clients include the Bush/Quayle campaign, the National Rifle Association and RJ Reynolds. The company has also worked for Florida's class size amendment.
The Republican National Committee hired Arno for a voter registration drive, said Mindy Tucker Fletcher, a senior adviser to the Florida GOP. Campaign finance reports show the RNC paid Arno $450,000 in one reporting period in September.
This is a pattern and practice, as we all know, with the Republicans.
So now enough about Acorn and all of the false indignation and false outrage about the "destroying the fabric of our democracy".
What is important here is that we get the full depth of this story out to the MSM as well as use it as ammunition against all of those individuals that might be a little concerned about Acorn after being spoon fed lies by Fox, McCain, and the Wingnut machine.
Not just that this one individual got arrested, but that the Republican Party knew about his tactics back in 2004 and hired him again to run the same scam.
UPDATE: First, thanks all for the rec'ds.
Regarding the update, it seems that this is a concerted Republican effort across multiple elections.
It seems that 12 people were arrested in 2006 and some pleaded guilty to the exact same offense in California. More importantly, these people received a small amount of jail time and extended probation.
More as one good commenter noted, Nathan Sproul who received 8.3 million for similar efforts.