In an Oct. 26 Newsmax article, Lowell Ponte continued his bogus attacks on Barack Obama and ACORN, 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.