Haven’t those dummies from ACORN ever heard of roundtabling?

The liberal activist group was easily caught by election officials in Lake County (Ind.) for turning in more than 2,000 voter registration forms, out of more than 5,000, that were called bogus. The give-away to the brazen fakery was the fact that so many of the signatures were identical. Application after application in the same handwriting.

How stupid can anyone be?

Didn’t they know about roundtabling, a time-honored Chicago machine practice at which a bunch of people sitting at tables pass around voter registration cards, nominating petitions or other forms of public documents so at least their bogus signatures didn’t all look the same on the same document?

What in the world are they teaching in activist schools these days? Saul Alinksky, the icon of direct action, would have been appalled. Where’s the respect for demonstrably effective methods of political cheating and deceit?

ACORN has a heavy presence in Chicago, and I take it as a matter of personal affront that someone trying to steal an election would be so incompetent. Is there no pride left? Sure, Chicago machine forgers and roundtablers occasionally are caught; my experience goes back to the early 1970s when as a young reporter for the Chicago Daily News I drew the assignment to check out suspicious addresses on nominating petitions that appeared to have been roundtabled. I found not a single person in an afternoon of doorbell ringing whose name was on the petition and said, “yes, that’s my signature.” More likely, the amazed response was, “How did that get there?”

Of course, some addresses were empty lots, or bars, or barbershops. Others were of dead people who used to live at the address. Much like the petitions that ACORN turned in to the Indiana election board. But in ACORN’s case, the fraud was so obvious that investigators didn’t even have to leave the office to spot it. It was so bad that a board official said they had stopped processing the ACORN petitions altogether. Instead, they have turned their attention to more obviously legitimate petitions so that those new voters wouldn’t be denied access to the polls because ACORN stole the board’s time with its deluge of fakery.

This should come as no surprise. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN for short, has been under investigation for more than four years for submitting fraudulent voter registrations in a number of states. Recently, Nevada authorities raided an ACORN office in Las Vegas, where workers are accused of registering members of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

Back in Indiana, after viewing fake registrations submitted in the names of the dead and of a fast-food restaurant, Jimmy Johns, Sally LaSota, a Democrat on the elections board, said, “ACORN, with its intent, perhaps was good in the beginning, but went awry somewhere.”

Beg your pardon, Ms. LaSota, but the intent was bad and its implementation went awry somewhere. Honest elections are the lynchpin of a democratic society, but you have to wonder if that thought has crossed anyone’s mind at ACORN. Or if they figure that stealing an election is perfectly acceptable in a democratic society because the end (ACORN’s end, that is) justifies the means.

If I were Barack Obama, I too wouldn’t want to admit that I had any connection with such boobs. Of course, Obama knew nothing of any of this, or so we are to believe. Even though Obama’s campaign gave ACORN a subsidiary $800,000 to register voters for the 2008 primaries. Even though ACORN‘s political wing endorsed Obama last February. Even though he served as general counsel for ACORN in Illinois, and directed generous grants to the group as the chairman of the Annenberg Challenge. All of which, I suppose, makes ACORN just another guy from the neighborhood.

So, are we also to believe that it’s just a coincidence that the fake voter registrations turned up in northwest Indiana, a Democratic stronghold with a large number of potential black voters who needed to get signed up? Normally, it wouldn’t change the election outcome, but Indiana, a traditionally Republican state, now is considered a battleground state, and every vote that can be extracted from bars and cemeteries in Democratic territory is worth the effort.

I guess that pointing this out, however, is illegal in the eyes of the Obama campaign. It had the audacity—if I can rescue the term’s exclusive use from Obama—to write on Oct. 17 to Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey and Special Prosecutor Nora Dannehy to demand a criminal investigation of those suggesting a connection. It should probe, the campaign’s lawyer said, “any involvement by the Justice Department and White House officials in supporting the McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee’s systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the Obama campaign has tried to shut up anyone who criticizes the candidate, witness the recent unsuccessful effort to intimidate WGN radio’s Milt Rosenberg into keeping one such critic off his highly respected show.

If any investigation is needed, it should be by local and federal grand juries into the connection between Obama and ACORN’s kinky voter registration techniques.

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Dennis Byrne is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer Editorial Board