Topic: Newsmax
In an Oct. 26 Newsmax article, Lowell Ponte misleadingly claimed that "Joe Biden did not tell the truth Thursday when hit with tough questions about ACORN from a veteran journalist."
Ponte wrote in response to Biden's claim that the Obama campaign "have not paid [ACORN] one single penny to register a single solitary voter":
A Newsmax Fact Check shows that Obama has had a long relationship with the group, and the Obama campaign did indeed pay an ACORN subsidiary more than $800,000. The radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a multi-faced creature its founders spun off into about 100 separate legal entities.
In our Oct. 6 investigation, Newsmax reported that ACORN’s founders “created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, Project Vote (run in Illinois in 1992 by Barack Obama), would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups,” some openly political and others tax-exempt and prohibited from direct political activism.
In fact, there is no evidence that the "ACORN subsidiary" to which the Obama campaign paid "more than $800,000" did any voter registration, as Ponte suggests. As we've noted, the money paid to Citizens Services Inc. was used for vote canvassing and other get-out-the-vote efforts, not registration.
Further, as we noted the last time Ponte made this claim, Project Vote was not an "ACORN front group" in 1992.
