Democratic election fraud in Troy, NY: a follow-up.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers. And Big Government readers, too.

(Via Atlas Shrugs) For the next time somebody tells you that Democrat/ACORN/WFP election registration fraud does not equal election fraud, feel free to point this story coming from Troy, New York, where the one led seamlessly to the other.  Feel free to also point out that it doesn’t take all that much to flip some races:

Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. Candidates would have been able to run both on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines in two weeks, and that could have given the Democrats the general election.

A special prosecutor is investigating the case and criminal charges are possible. New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Lynch ruled that there were “significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process.”

[Bolding mine.]

The issue in this case has to do with New York’s very vigorous multiple-party system: the more ‘lines’ a candidate can appear on, the more likely it is that he or she can win an election. WFP is particularly useful in that regard, given that it’s pretty much an appendage of the Democratic party:

Hillary Clinton garnered 2.7 percent of her total votes from the WFP line when she first ran for Senate in 2000, which increased to 5 percent of her total vote in 2006. In September, Clinton’s former campaign manager for her 2000 Senate run, New York City Councilman Bill DeBlasio, who has been endorsed by the WFP, beat two long-established politicians in the Democratic primary. Critics also accuse the Working Families Party of having a long association with the troubled activist group, ACORN. Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s CEO, is one of the party’s co-founders. The New York Times reported this month that “Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director, worked with ACORN in New York to set up the Working Families political party and sat on the party’s board with Ms. Lewis.”

The WFP has also endorsed New York Democratic Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, who was one of only seven Senators who voted against cutting federal housing funds to ACORN in September.

See here for more on the Patrick Gaspard/ACORN/WFP connection; and see here for Sen. Gillibrand’s boosting of the WFP (prior to all of this coming out, of course). The bottom line? In New York, WFP is ACORN is the Democratic Party – and stories like this show that the enthusiasm with which all three local sub-groups break the law is only matched by the enthusiasm that all three sub-groups show in blaming somebody else when they get caught doing it.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.