Saturday, October 18, 2008

ACORN Is Not The Problem

I remember two years ago when various Republican legislators from each state had their own perverted version of a performing art stunt in which the legislators would stand in front of a house, usually in the inner city or other poorer area of a major city, waving papers they said had a list of thousands of names of fraudulent voters, and use almost the same speech to demand voter suppression. It turned out that these lists were bogus, and there was no mass conspiracy to steal the election. Not by the Democrats anyway. The Republicans obsession with trying to put the fear of voter fraud into people reached the point where any US Attorney with enough integrity to say that there was no conspiracy, was summarily fired.

Now the Republicans are up to the same shenanigans, but this time, ACORN is their bogeyman.

In the Seattle Post Intellingcer, there is an article this morning about the ACORN issue. Basically, it sums it up as that it is not ACORN that is the problem, but the individual canvassers:
But however deplorable the behavior of ACORN workers in submitting phony registrations for the likes of cartoon characters and sports stars, it seems unlikely that the group's misdeeds will affect many votes in November.

In issuing his dire warning in the debate, McCain apparently conflated voter-registration fraud with voter fraud. Voter-registration fraud -- at least, of the type ACORN workers committed in Seattle last year and allegedly engaged in elsewhere this year -- is annoying, potentially costly to taxpayers and certainly illegal, but not, by itself, a serious threat to democratic foundations.

Voter fraud, on the other hand, can change the outcome of elections.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a Republican, said last year that the ACORN case in Seattle had nothing to do with manipulating outcomes and everything to do with the workers' efforts to keep their $8-an-hour jobs. If anyone was defrauded, it was ACORN, an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

"The defendants ... cheated their employers to get paid for work they did not actually perform," Satterberg said. "The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets."

[...]

Voter fraud occurs when voters deliberately cast ineligible ballots. For example, a voter may fill out, sign and return a mail ballot sent to a fellow resident who recently died. Or a voter could impersonate an eligible voter and register and vote in that person's name. Or a voter who is not a U.S. citizen could nonetheless sign the oath of citizenship on the registration form and be placed on the rolls. Proven cases of voter fraud are rare.

Another type of elections fraud involves crimes committed by elections workers, such as creating bogus registrations and then filling out and counting ballots under those entries. McCain has not suggested that might occur in November.

Of course, facts like this won't slow the Republicans from trying to make ACORN into the Willie Horton of 2008*. This is even more clearly limned by the erudite Brew City Brawler, who highlights the fact that the recently announced FBI investigation into ACORN is purely a political stunt by the Republicans in a desperate effort to maintain what little control they may after the upcoming election.

The bigger concern should be the concerted effort across the country by the Republicans to blatantly prevent eligible voters from exercising their Constitutional right to vote. Fortunately, their scheme is so blatantly unconstitutional that even the conservative Supreme Court of the United States couldn't back up their efforts at voter suppression.

Tis a sad thing for the Republicans that they can not win on policies, nor even with their string of negative personal attacks. They have to resort to oppression and intimidation just to have a chance of minimizing the losses they are sure to face on November 4.

* The line was so good I had to steal it from Gretchen Schuldt.

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