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Don’t Be Fooled: Republican Charges Against ACORN Are Bogus |
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Magicians often talk about how they use diversion to trick audiences—keep them focused on something on the side while the real action they don’t want you to see is going on somewhere else. That’s what John McCain and the Republican Party are up to with their latest charges against the grassroots group ACORN.
Here are the facts:
- ACORN and Project Vote registered 1.3 million poor people, persons of color and young people, groups that generally vote for Democrats. To register this number of new voters, the groups hired 13,000 canvassers who went door to door in their neighborhoods. The Republicans especially don’t want these groups to vote in large numbers and are doing everything they can to suppress what could be a huge vote for the Democrats.
- ACORN has a tight system of checking voter registration forms. Staff call people whose names are on the forms after they fill them out. And if they find a bad signature card, they put it in a special package, identify it in writing as suspicious. They then encourage election officials to investigate and offer to help with prosecutions.
- Nearly every case of potential “voter registration fraud” that recently has been reported originally was reported by ACORN, which notified election authorities of suspect signatures. ACORN turns in the ineligible forms because—and McCain won’t say this—many state laws require all the signatures be turned in, regardless of whether they are valid. As a matter of fact, in a highly publicized case in Nevada, state voting officials ignored ACORN’s warnings about suspect voter registration forms.
Brian Kettering of Florida ACORN puts it in perspective:
As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift.
Any large voter registration operation will have a small percentage of workers who turn in bogus registration forms. Their goal clearly is not to cast a fraudulent vote. It is simply to defraud their employer, ACORN, by getting a paycheck without earning it. ACORN is the victim of this fraud—not the perpetrator.
It’s not unusual for these types of problems to surface in a big voter registration effort. As Steven Rosenfeld reports in Oxdown Gazette, Republicans in California had the same problem in 2006, when the party used a private contractor to register 750,000 people.
The details were all spelled out in a series of Los Angeles Times stories, which quoted former California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres saying such errors are inevitable “when you use private vendors.” Even the state’s top election official in 2006, Republican Bruce McPherson, was forced to investigate his own party’s actions.
So why the big deal now? As Tom Matzzie points out on Huffington Post, the con job here is the assumption that bad voter registration cards will lead to vote fraud.
If somebody submits a card for Mickey Mouse it isn’t like Mr. Mouse is going to show up to vote. There is no voter fraud if nobody votes.
The Center for American Progress reports that mass voter fraud is a conservative myth used to justify increasing the difficulty of the voting process. The center’s newsletter quotes Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College who investigated allegations of widespread voter fraud, who says:
From 2002 to 2005, only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That’s 26 criminal voters—voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident….Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls.
But back to the magician’s diversion. While the press and the McCain campaign are trying to focus our attention on bogus claims against ACORN, the real story is going on elsewhere. The Republicans are still trying to purge voter rolls through all sorts of dirty tricks like caging, targeted voter roll purges and disenfranchising foreclosure victims. The Republicans just recently filed suit to thwart a law they proposed that allows voters to register and vote the same day.
And, as Matzzie warns:
Conservatives plan to claim that ACORN and Barack Obama stole the election. Their hope is to steal the legitimacy of what is looking like a massive repudiation of Bush, conservatives and the Republican Party.
Conservatives are scared of a progressive majority. And they’re going to lie, cheat and steal to prevent it from happening. But they can only be successful if we let them.
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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
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Let’s see I believe it is 9 states investgating Acorn,there must be some reason.I believe the investgastions should continue just to be sure Acorn is on the up and up.Also unless many more people are registering as democrat than republican. What do the republicans have to fear?Now if it’s a lopesided number registering for either party we probably have a problem.I believe we can not be to careful in our zeal to register new voters.
The Anti-ACORN campaign has two goals:
1. They want to “turn the page” from the subject of the economy. To do this, they are creating a Boogey Man out of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
2. At the same time they are trying to justify why they will not accept the results of the election if Barack Obama wins.
According to a Washington Post article,
“On the way into the event [in Waukesha, WI], the Republican Party of Wisconsin handed out fliers reading ‘Your Vote Is Being Stolen,’ an anti-ACORN leaflet that concluded, ‘Why is vote fraud allowed? Vote fraud is allowed since it benefits Democrats.’”
In the next week you’re going to hear plenty about ACORN. You’re going to hear about raids on their headquarters and suspected voter fraud. For example, in Las Vegas, the police raided the ACORN headquarters and seized computers and papers. If you just read the headline, you feel sure the local ACORN office must have been up to no good. But read this press release from ACORN that tells their side of the story. According to the press release:
“Anytime ACORN quality control staff has identified a suspicious application, we have separated that application out and flagged it for election officials. We turn any suspicious applications to election officials separately, along with a cover sheet identifying the nature of the problem and an offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual. (Note that civic organizations are required by law to turn over ANY signed voter registration applications even when they are known to have problems). We immediately dismiss any employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations. “
Let’s be clear. ACORN has had some serious issues with overzealous workers who falsified voter registrations. This is tragic and alarming. But it does not mean that all of the millions of voters that were registered by ACORN are invalid.
What is behind the sudden surge of stories on ACORN? Ask Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who said on Fox News:
“…these rumblings that you’re hearing, it’s quite interesting. Our office is being barraged by numerous, numerous, tens, dozens, hundreds of phone calls. In addition, people close to me who do not work in the secretary of state’s office are getting calls from random callers about one issue after another concerning voter fraud, even at 2:00 in the morning.
“So there is a concentrated effort going on out there to try to build the noise that you’re discussing. And it’s unfortunate because if we can find a specific allegation, we’ll deal with it directly. But again, this creating fear in the minds of law-abiding citizens that somehow their vote is not going to count or that it’s going to be diluted is a huge disservice to the voters of Ohio and to the rest of the country.”
Obviously, Republican operatives are fanning the flames of this story. Watch for propaganda against ACORN to spring up on blogs, YouTube and other outlets, including the mainstream media.
But what’s the end game? Besides distracting us from the economy, what’s the point of all of this noise about ACORN?
According to a story by Tom Curry at MSNBC:
“The co-chairman of the McCain advisory team in charge of monitoring alleged voter fraud, former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, hinted this week at potential post-Nov. 4 litigation if Obama wins due to suspect voters who had been registered by ACORN. ‘The contest could go on for a very long time,’ he told reporters.”
So, the McCain campaign is trying to simultaneously distract you from the financial crisis, while preparing to contest the election if Barack Obama wins.
This is nothing more than a preemptive strike by the Republicans to reject the results of an election that they have already lost. If the McCain campaign is so concerned about your right to vote, why are they not talking about is the illegal purging of voter rolls? The Republicans are not interested in talking about voters who are being disenfranchised. They’re too busy setting up their cover story for rejecting the election.
Here’s what we can do. First, don’t let them change the subject. Keep the conversation focused on what everyday Americans need: the kind of change in Washington that Barack Obama can bring.
Second, the best way to ensure we prevent a long contracted legal battle over the election is for Obama to win by a landslide. If Obama wins every swing state by a significant margin, the Republicans will have a harder time crying foul.
In many states you can vote today. Check http://www.voteforchange.com/ for details of where and when you can vote.
Don’t let the Republicans turn the page on us. Don’t let them steal the election with allegations of voter fraud.
Let’s turn the page to the economy. Then we can get into ACORN’s involvement in the sub-prime markets, their tactics with banks, Obama’s connection to that economic issue regulation of Freddie and Fannie, stuff like that.
The republicans will do anything to steal this election. As for having associates that are terrorists, one candidate does pal around with a convicted felon and terrorist. The candidate recently said to this felon and terrorist “I respect you, I respect your family” this convicted felon and terrorist gave the candidate $1000 so far this year for his campaign. The terrorist has said in the past about US Federal Agents “Go for a head shot, they will be wearing bulletproof vests, kill the sons of bit##es.” Who am I talking about?
McCain and his dear friend G.Gordon Liddy
see more at http://www.republicantricks.com
I’m just a red necked hillbilly but I will tell you all where there is smoke there is usually a fire.This happens to often for it to be just be a bunch of bad employees.I know you are probably correct in what the Republican Party will claim if the election is close and I would hate to see that happen and so no one calls me Partisan I am an Independent and I’m not voting for either of these fools,I think they are both bad choices and part of the problem not the solution.My concern is I don’t believe our voter registration works very well and all fraud could be eliminated.No one should be out soliciting for voters.If the parties themselves won’t commit the resourses to register people tough luck,also if you don’t have enough interest to go and register yourself and prove you are legal to vote,you should not be voting.
So where was the Republican concern for voter fraud back in 2000 and 2004?
McCain has nothing to offer the American people and has resorted to inuendos, distortions and out and out lies!
We must not allow McCain to steal the election (as did G.W.Bush) Obama is the last hope for our nation, but it depends on our willingness to get him elected despite the barriers and distractions!
There’s a very good article in the newest edition of “The Nation” (Oct. 27, 2008), titled “Six Ways They’re Trying to Steal Your Vote”, by Greg Palast. Then it offers solutions in the following article, “Steal Back Your Vote in Seven Easy Steps.” I encourage every person out there who is concerned about the implications of the attack on ACORN to take a look at this article. In fact, it doesn’t matter what political party you endorse, I encourage everyone to read “The Nation.”