Times Union via Election Journal:
City housing authority officials have sealed off the office of a longtime worker who allegedly helped obtain absentee applications from voters who said their information had been forged on election ballots filed in the Sept. 15 primary.
William B. Meissner, executive secretary of the Troy Housing Authority, said he locked down the riverfront office of housing authority clerk Anthony Defiglio on Saturday morning after learning about the scandal first exposed in Saturday’s Times Union.
Defiglio has worked for the authority for several years. He allegedly was involved in obtaining absentee ballot applications from several public housing residents who said someone had forged their signatures or listed false information in the election documents without their knowledge.
”We changed the passwords on the computer and we’ve also advised Tony Defiglio not to go into Building 4 at Taylor (apartments) where he works,” Meissner said.
Defiglio could not be reached for comment.
The voting scandal centers on allegations that people associated with the city’s Democratic party may have forged absentee ballots attributed to several dozen voters registered on the Working Families Party line, including students and people living in the city’s public housing complexes.
The ballots were listed under the names of people who had registered to vote on the WFP line. The WFP has been a battleground third-party line between the city’s Republicans and Democrats for years. In all, about 50 WFP absentee ballot applications were filed in Troy out of about 126 county-wide.
What’s that, you say? This is all about voter fraud and the Working Families Party, not ACORN?
Don’t let the name fool you, as Roger Stone puts it…
The Working Families Party is not about working people or families and it isn’t really a party. The WFP is a wholly owned subsidiary of ACORN. Bertha Lewis co-chair of the Working Families Party is the Executive Director of New York ACORN. New York ACORN leader, Steven Kest was the moving force in forming the party and WFP headquarters are located at the same address as ACORN’s national and New York office at 88 Third Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.
WFP is essentially a money funnel which pays for an aggressive door to door canvas. Largely funded by unions, the WFP is ACORN’s “political arm” in New York State. Candidates supported by the Working Families Party and issues supported by ACORN are both advocated on the door steps of target voter homes as they share one major voter canvas.
The Working Families Party has no county organizations or county committee men or women and no local structure beyond its top leadership and an army of paid canvassers. Since the major parties no longer have the man power to organize an effective voter canvas, Democrats have turned to the WFP for their door to door campaign activities.
But more importantly, the Working Families Party is a criminal enterprise utilizing a for-profit political consulting firm, Data and Field Services (DFS) to skirt New York City election laws regarding public finance and campaign spending limits.
It’s the classic “pay to play” politics. Candidates like Democrat Bill de Blasio pay the Working Families Party and this shady “consulting firm” which operates from the same address as the WFP and New York ACORN. The city Campaign Finance Board recently said “there are no apparent firewalls between them.” The New York Daily News has called the relationship between candidates endorsed by the WFP and DFS an “election funding scam.”
And yet, after all this, New York Senator Gillibrand can’t find it in her heart to defund ACORN, Barack Obama thinks it isn’t the biggest issue facing the country so he ignores it, and Charlie Gibson, anchor for ABC’s World News Tonight hadn’t heard of the issue even though it was breaking while he was giving the interview in which he said so.
My question is, what does ACORN have to do before we stop seeing the complacency of the country staring it right in the face? Skirting tax laws, rigging elections… Frankly, I think they’re getting off easy if all they end up with is a loss of funding.