First, a little history on ACORN and in their involvement in voter registration fraud, their involvement in the mortgage crisis and in their involvement with many high level Senate Democrats who help push their agenda in Congress.  (The video is eight minutes long, but it’s worth watching the whole thing.)

Now after watching that, what kind of influence would they have in an Obama presidency?

(Read more after the leap)

How badly do they want to be involved and put Obama over the top?

How does 30% of their registrations being fraudulent sound?  Sounds like more than a few bad apples.

The folks over at ACORN – Barack Obama’s favorite “community organizers” – now admit that more than 30 percent of the 1.3 million voter-registration forms they submitted this year were rejected by election officials nationwide.

So much for claims by the left that the issue is nothing to worry about.

Never mind all those applications by Mickey Mouse and Jive Turkey.

ACORN says no more than “1 to 1.5 percent” involved actual fraud – which was committed, according to their friends at The New York Times, by “low-income field workers trying to please their supervisors.” They were only following orders, you see . . .

Then again, yesterday’s Times admits that ACORN-related voting fraud seems “to have resonated” – even among some Democrats and independents.

And with good reason.

Just a few days earlier, People for the American Way, the left-wing advocacy group, took out a full-page ad in the Times defending ACORN.

Charges of fraud, said the ad, are all a bunch of lies cooked up by “right-wing operatives” intent on keeping “low-income people and African-Americans from voting.”

Maybe there were some problems with ACORN’s voter registrations, the ad says, but only “a few bad apples” were responsible.

Too bad People for the American Way couldn’t read the same day’s Times before it placed that ad.

Because a long story a couple of pages later cites a report by ACORN’s own lawyer that says the relationships between the group’s 174 affiliates may have violated multiple federal laws.

And lest you think 2008 is an isolated year:

Although the organization prides itself for its registration efforts, it also has a long history of scandal. In the state of Missouri in 1986, 12 ACORN members were convicted of voter fraud. But that case was not an isolated incident in the state. In December 2004, in St. Louis, six volunteers pleaded guilty of dozens of election law violations for filling out registration cards with names of dead people and other bogus information. Authorities launched an earlier investigation after noticing that among the new voters was longtime St. Louis alderman Albert “Red” Villa, who died in 1990. The volunteers worked for “Operation Big Vote” — a branch of ACORN — in St. Louis.

On February 10, 2005, Nonaresa Montgomery, a paid worker who ran Operation Big Vote during the run-up to the 2001 mayoral primary, was found guilty of vote fraud. Montgomery hired about 30 workers to do fraudulent voter-registration canvassing. Instead of knocking on doors, the volunteers sat at a St. Louis fast food restaurant and wrote out names and information from an outdated voter list. About 1,500 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in.

In October 2006, St. Louis election officials discovered at least 1,492 “potentially fraudulent” voter registration cards. They were all turned in by ACORN volunteers.

In November 2006, 20,000 to 35,000 questionable voter registration forms were turned in by ACORN officials in Missouri. Most all of these were from St. Louis and Kansas City areas, where ACORN purportedly sought to help empower the “disenfranchised” minorities living there. But the ACORN workers weren’t just told to register new voters. The workers admitted on camera that they were coached to tell registrants to vote for Democrat Claire McCaskill.

In 2007, in Kansas City, Missouri, four ACORN employees were indicted for fraud. In April of this year eight ACORN employees in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting bogus voter registrations.

And, that was just Missouri.

This year there have been several accusations of fraud against ACORN. Over a dozen states are investigating the organization already. Here is a complete list of the ongoing investigations:

North Carolina — State Board of Elections officials have found at least 100 voter registration forms with the same names over and over again. The forms were turned in by ACORN. Officials sent about 30 applications to the state Board of Elections for possible fraud investigation.

Ohio — The New York Post reported that a Cleveland man said he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times. The complaints have sparked an investigation by election officials into the organization, whose political wing has supported Barack Obama. Witnesses have already been subpoenaed to testify against the organization.

Nevada — Authorities raided the headquarters of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now on Tuesday October 7, 2008, after a month-long investigation. The fraudulent voter registrations included the Dallas Cowboys starting line-up.

Indiana — More than 2,000 voter registration forms filed in northern Indiana’s Lake County filled out by ACORN employees turned out to be bogus. Officials also stopped processing a stack of about 5,000 applications delivered just before the October 6 registration deadline after the first 2,100 turned out to be phony.

Connecticut — Officials are looking into a complaint alleging ACORN submitted fraudulent voter registration cards in Bridgeport. In one instance, an official said a card was filled out for a 7-year-old girl, whose age was listed as 27. 8,000 cards were submitted in Bridgeport.

Missouri — The Kansas City election board is reporting 100 duplicate applications and 280 with fake information. Acorn officials agreed that at least 4% of their registrations were bogus. Governor Matt Blunt condemned the attempts by ACORN to commit voter fraud.

Pennsylvania — Officials are investigating suspicious or incomplete registration forms submitted by ACORN. 252,595 voter registrations were submitted in Philadelphia. Remarkably, 57,435 were rejected — most of them submitted by ACORN.

Wisconsin — In Milwaukee ACORN improperly used felons as registration workers. Additionally, its workers are among 49 cases of bad registrations sent to authorities for possible charges, as first reported by the Journal Sentinel.

Florida — The Pinellas County Elections supervisor says his office has received around 35 voter registrations that appear to be bogus. There is also a question of 30,000 felons who are registered illegally to vote. Their connections with ACORN are not yet clear.

Texas — Of the 30,000 registration cards ACORN turned in, Harris County tax assessor Paul Bettencourt says just more than 20,000 are valid. And just look at some of the places ACORN was finding those voters. A church just next door is the address for around 150 people. More than 250 people claim a homeless outreach center as their home address. Some listed a county mental health facility as their home and one person even wrote down the Harris County jail at the sheriff’s office.

Michigan — ACORN in Detroit is being investigated after several municipal clerks reported fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications coming through. The clerk interviewed said the fraud appears to be widespread.

New Mexico – The Bernalillo County clerk has notified prosecutors that some 1,100 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in by ACORN.

That’s not all. So far this year at least 14 states have started investigations against ACORN. Talk about a culture of corruption.

Barack Obama is wisely distancing himself from corrupt left wing organization. The question becomes, however, will he continue to distance himself from them after election day whether he wins or loses on November 4th?