MUCH ADO ABOUT ACORN

It's October of an election year. And as predictable as the turning of the autumn leaves, comes the Republican cries about the evils of ACORN and voter fraud. Now don't get me wrong, I am not trying to make light of what could be a serious problem. But listening to the Right will cause you to confuse the crime of Voter Fraud (a major offense) with the lesser crime of voter registration fraud. They are screaming about the potential problems of the oak when all they really have in hand are a few nuts.




ACORN is an organization dedicated to being a political voice for the poor. They are involved in a number of projects that include working on housing issues, rebuilding New Orleans, school lunch menus, etc. The most visible arm of their work is their voter registration drives. Both in 2004 & 2006 there were allegations that ACORN was submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registrations. These allegations have resurfaced this election cycle as well. The Right would have you believe that these registrations are being done in order to alter the results of the election. They will remind you that Sen. Obama once represented ACORN as an attorney and has worked for them repeatedly over the years. They then allege that the Obama campaign is behind this "conspiracy". They point out that the Obama campaign gave 830,000 dollars to ACORN and on an FEC report listed it for "event management" instead of voter registration. (We know this because the Obama campaign amended the report without prompting. If they hadn't we would never know this.)




I have a lot of trouble with "conspiracy theories". For a conspiracy to be big enough to make a difference in the real world, it requires a lot of people's active participation. It also requires them to keep quite about it. (And nobody has ever accused Democrats of being "quiet" or of being able to keep a secret.) What I think has happened instead is an organization with lofty goals being bogged down in the nuts & bolts operation of their agenda. The incompetence of the organization is then used as "evidence" of massive wrongdoing with large leaps of assumption thrown in to smear both the organization and the Democratic candidate. A review of their operations is not out of line, but to condemn them for "fixing" an election is a stretch of the imagination.




It is a fact that ACORN has submitted many fraudulent voter registrations. We know this in part because ACORN flags many of these when they turn them in. But the law requires them to turn in all registrations they take, regardless of ACORN's belief in their authenticity. (If this was not the case, you would be hearing cries that ACORN throws away any registrations they think would vote Republican.) The legal requirement to turn them in is a safe guard to protect both sides.




The next major question is why take fake registrations in the first place if not to alter an election? Well, the fraud is not being perpetrated by the organization on America, but by the workers of ACORN on ACORN itself. ACORN hires out of work people to do the registration. They are trying to give a "hand up" to the poor by giving them a paycheck. In many cases this is a great thing, but some of the people they hire are more interested in getting a paycheck than in helping out. If you are told you must get 25 registrations per day to keep your job, then a few will always decide to take the cards home, look through the phone book and make up the names. This way they can keep their paycheck (without going through the hassle of the work). Eventually they are caught & fired...but the law requires that they submit their registrations regardless.




Now Sen. Obama did as an attorney represent ACORN in Illinois. What the right doesn't want you to know is that his co-council for this was the UNITED STATES JUSTICE DEPARTMENT. And his involvement with them afterwards has been as a guest speaker twice to the Chicago branch as a motivational speaker to a group of about 50. Now if the fact that he still spoke to them twice bothers you, keep in mind that in February 2006, John McCain was the keynote speaker at a major immigration rally in Florida sponsored by (drum roll please) ACORN. It is even more interesting to note that much of the speech was to praise the work of ACORN. Talk about flip-flops!




It is also interesting to note that while voter fraud registration is evident.....THERE HAVE BEEN NO CASES OF TRUE VOTE FRAUD! No trials, no convictions, not much of anything except cries of cheating ALWAYS timed just before the next election. And that brings me to my final observation. Does anyone really believe that if this was a true danger to Democracy, that Republicans would just drop it every year after the election is done? Wouldn't they spend the next two years making sure that they weren't cheated again?




This is nothing more than a distraction. Republicans have controlled the House & Senate for so long that they don't want you to look at issues. They don't want you to think about the economy or Iraq or any of the real problems facing America. They want you to believe that Democrats are stealing the election by registering fictional cartoon characters in a Disneyland vote drive. But until Mickey Mouse shows up at the polls to vote: ACORN's stealing the election is just an urban myth. Much ado about NOTHING!