It’s not so non-existent after all:

Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer.

Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which was stamped with the logo of the nonprofit group ACORN.

ACORN swears it is innocent. Sure it is. All of the voter fraud stories connected with it must just be a coincidence. (There are more than just those stories floating around, of course.)

Gosh darn it, ACORN just can’t catch a break:

Investigators probing ACORN have learned that an Ohio man registered to vote several times and cast a bogus ballot with a fake address, officials said yesterday, as they revealed that nearly 4,000 registration applications supplied by the left-leaning activist group were suspect.

The vote of Darnell Nash, one of four people subpoenaed in a Cuyahoga County probe of ACORN’s voter-registration activities, was canceled and his case was turned over to local prosecutors and law enforcement, Board of Elections officials said yesterday.

Nash had registered to vote repeatedly from an address that belonged to a legitimately registered voter, officials said during a hearing at which the subpoenaed voters were to testify.

Board officials had contacted Nash this summer, questioned his address and told him to stop repeat registering.

But still, he breezed into Ohio election offices – the state allows early voting for president – reregistered with a fake address and cast a paper ballot, officials said.

And again:

Teenager Freddie Johnson said he was offered smokes and dollar bills to fill out voter registration cards.

And now the Cuyahoga County Elections Board has 73 cards with Johnson’s name on them.

Johnson and another prolific registrant were subpoenaed to testify at a meeting Monday as the Elections Board continued its look at possible fraud by ACORN, a national organization that tries to get low- and moderate-income people to register. ACORN’s methods have drawn interest in a number of states this presidential election year.

Johnson, 19, said he mostly was trying to help ACORN workers who begged him to sign up because they needed to keep their jobs.

“They’d come up with a sob story why they needed the signature,” said Johnson, of Garfield Heights.

ACORN leaders have acknowledged that workers paid by the hour were given quotas to fill.

And remember:

. . . According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an “affordable housing” provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.

I know that Congress is currently under the control of those who benefit from ACORN’s shenanigans. But the determination on the part of Congress to ignore all of this sordid evidence and refuse to hold hearings is nothing short of sinful.

The Bush Administration should appoint a Special Prosecutor to check all of this out. I know that the Administration is on its way out, but if we are to have an Obama Presidency, let the burden be on Obama to shut the investigation down. That way, everyone can see not only who is engaging in election fraud, but who might be engaged in covering up that fraud as well.