A Mighty Hoax from ACORN Grows

ACORN
and election fraud. Hang on. As soon as I can get the alligator that
crawled out of my toilet back into the New York City sewers where it
belongs, I can turn my attention to this very important topic.

You see, the ACORN "election fraud" story is one of those urban
legends, like fake moon landings and alligators in the sewers, and it
appears three or four weeks before every recent national election with
the regularity of the swallows returning to Capistrano.

First, the basics: ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now, is an activist group working with low and
moderate income families that, among many other things, registers
voters. To do this they hire people to go around signing up the
unregistered, killing two birds with one stone -- giving employment to
people who need it (some with criminal records) and providing the
opportunity to vote to members of minority communities whose voices all
too often go unheard.

What happens is that some of those hired to do the registering, who are
paid by the name, make people up. As a result, you'll discover that
among the registrants are such obvious fakes as Mickey Mouse and the
starting line-up of the Dallas Cowboys, among others.

This is where the Republican meme kicks in. As they have in past
elections (although now louder and more angrily than ever), the GOP has
made ACORN the red flag du jour
as the party tries to mobilize its conservative base and, allegedly,
attempts to suppress the vote and distract attention from accusations
of election tampering made against them, too.

The charge is that these fake registrations will create havoc at the
polls. On Tuesday morning, former Republican Senators John Danforth and
Warren Rudman, chairs of Senator McCain's Honest and Open Elections
Committee, held a press conference and described the results of the bad
seeds in ACORN's registration program as "a potential nightmare."
Danforth said he was concerned "that this election night and the days
that follow will be a rerun of 2000, and even worse than 2000."

John McCain raised it at Wednesday night's final debate and went further, adding, "We
need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with
ACORN, who [sic] is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the
greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the
fabric of democracy..."

Obama
replied, "ACORN is a community organization. Apparently, what they have
done is they were paying people to go out and register folks. And
apparently, some of the people who were out there didn't really
register people; they just filled out a bunch of names. Had nothing to
do with us. We were not involved."

Which is not to say Obama has not been associated with ACORN in the
recent past. He has. As he said in the debate, as a lawyer, he joined
with the group in partnership with the US Justice Department to
implement a motor voter registration law in Illinois -- allowing folks
to register to vote at their local DMV. His work as a community
organizer bought him into contact with ACORN, the organization received
money from the Woods Fund while he was a board member there and his
presidential campaign gave ACORN more than $800,000 to help with get
out the vote campaigns during the primary season -- but not,
apparently, for registration drives.

All of this distracts from several important points. ACORN has
registered 1.3 million voters, and maintains that in virtually every
instance they are the ones who have reported the incidents of fraud.

As the organization asserted in a response to Senator McCain, "ACORN
hired 13,000 field workers to register people to vote. In any endeavor
of this size, some people will engage in inappropriate conduct. ACORN
has a zero tolerance policy and terminated any field workers caught
engaging in questionable activity. At the end of the day, as ACORN is
paying these people to register voters, it is ACORN that is defrauded."
Arrests have been made, as well they should be.

Add to this the simple fact that registration fraud is not election
fraud. Seventy-five, made-up people who are registered as, say, "Brad
Pitt," are not likely going to show up at some polling place on
November 4 to vote in the election. Because they don't exist. (Besides, Angelina would never give them time off from babysitting duties.)

Granted, there are ways to mail in an absentee ballot under a fake name
and, too, from time to time some joker is going to come to the polls
and try to bluff his or her way in. But despite the charge that
thousands and thousands of fakes will flood the machines and throw the
count, it does not happen very often. And according to ACORN, "Even RNC
[Republican National Committee] General Counsel Sean Cairncross has
recently acknowledged he is not aware of a single improper vote cast as
a result of bad cards submitted in the course of an organized voter
registration effort."

Not that this has stopped the GOP from banging the same drum every
national election. And amnesiac members of the media and some
government agencies from buying into it every time. Last year, The New York Times
reported that the federal Election Assistance Commission, created by
the Help America Vote Act, legislation enacted after the Florida
debacle, was told by a pair of experts -- one Republican, the other
described as having "liberal leanings" -- that there was not that much
fraud to be found. But their conclusions were downplayed.

As per the Times,
"Though the original report said that among experts 'there is
widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling
place fraud,' the final version of the report released to the public
concluded in its executive summary that 'there is a great deal of
debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.'"

Which raises the ongoing investigation of the Justice Department's
firing of those eight US attorneys shortly after President Bush's
re-election. It shouldn't be forgotten that despite official
explanations, half of them were let go after refusing to prosecute vote
fraud charges demanded by Republicans. The attorneys had determined
there was little or no evidence of skullduggery; certainly not enough
to prosecute.

(In an interview with Talking Points Memo on Thursday, one of those
fired, David Iglesias, reacted to reports that the FBI has launched an
investigation of ACORN: "I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted
out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic.")

What's equally if not more scary are continued allegations of
Republican attempts at "caging" minority voters -- making challenge
lists of African- and Hispanic-Americans registered in heavily
Democratic districts. Just this week, a Federal judge in Michigan ruled
that voters could not be purged from the rolls in that state simply
because their mailing address was invalid -- this followed a failed
attempt by a Michigan Republican county chairman to use a list of
foreclosed homes as the basis of voter challenges.

This comes on the heels of a recent report from the Brennan Center at
New York University documenting how state officials -- often with the
best of intentions -- purge huge numbers of perfectly legal voters from
the rolls.

As my colleague Bill Moyers reported, "Hundreds of thousands of legal
voters may have been dumped in recent years, many without ever being
notified." The report describes a "process that is shrouded in secrecy,
prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation."

Hardly reassuring words if you want democracy to work, and sadly, not an urban legend, but the simple truth.