Submitted by: Robert Lunsford

CLEVELAND – Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.

The huge effort by a pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, takes advantage of a quirk in the state’s elections laws that allows people to register and cast ballots at the same time without having to prove residency.

Republicans have argued that the window could lead to widespread voter fraud because officials wouldn’t have an opportunity to verify registration information before ballots were cast.

Among the volunteers were Yori Stadlin and Vivian Lehrer of the Upper West Side, who got married last week and decided to spend their honeymoon shepherding voters to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Early today, Stadlin’s van picked up William Woods, 59, at the soup kitchen of the Bishop Cosgrove Center.

“I never voted before,” Woods said, because of a felony conviction that previously barred him from the polls. “Without this service, I would have had no way to get here.”

Last Thursday a federal grand jury in Kansas City indicted four persons working for the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, accusing them of submitting more than 15,000 voter registration forms with fictitious names, phony signatures and bogus addresses.

ACORN is a liberal advocacy group that claims to speak for the poor and minorities — running these voter registration drives no doubt to prime the pump for an Election Day voter turnout operation that includes multiple voting by the same people at different precincts in a state with a tightly contested Senate race.

For instance, The Wall Street Journal reported that an Ohio ACORN worker was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent voter registration cards. Many of the newly registered voters were deceased, underage or were named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy or Jive Turkey.

In Minnesota, authorities founds hundreds of voter registration cards in the trunk of a car owned by a former ACORN worker suspected of registering voters twice so he could double his fees.

Lee ADDS: Sadly Barak Obama could never thank all of his supporters as many would be dead, undreage or NON existent. The ones that were legitimate would hacve seen the will of Illegal VOTERS determine the Presidency of the USA!