The Real ACORN Story
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| Fri, 10-10-2008 - 8:38pm |
The Gist of the ACORN Story
The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.
ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.
I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.
To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News ...
At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.
Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.
The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.
Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.
Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.
It's that simple.
Late Update: McCain's sleaze and disgrace just runs deeper and deeper. This just in from TPM Reader DW ...
McCain's team has been pushing it on reporters today and just put out one of the most obvious web videos yet.
I say "obvious" because the implication of the 24/7 Fox coverage is made blatant. It's transference. It's saying to white voters, "we know you're angry about the economy. Don't blame Wall Street. Blame the n-----s."
McCain's going to lose, and he knows it. This is a 90-second ad aimed at the base who are watching Fox News. But he's setting up a large proportion (maybe the majority) of the GOP base to believe that scary blacks stole the election for Barack Obama. He's stoking race hatred. He is scum, and if in 10 years his name isn't synonymous with Lester Maddox and George Wallace than historians won't have done their job.
It's really true. The essence of McCain's campaign now appears to amount to prepping McCain's base to believe they didn't really lose the election. The election was stolen from them by Barack and his army of gangsters and black street hustlers.

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I have been really curious about these apparent fraudulent registrations.
More: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Tens_of_thousands_illegally_blocked_from_1009.html
The Republicans are trying to steal the battleground states again. What, the Republicans cheat? Never, never, not them. Now round up the usual suspects.
I would like to know how the Republicans feel about Voters Outreach of America.
Guild Member since 2009
did you read this line in the article YOU posted?
While neither party appears to have been guilty of violations
and yes it goes on to say it would most likely hurt Dems more ... how is this repubs stealing when they did nothing wrong, when neither party did anything wrong?
Did I "even read" the post. Yes. And did you "even think" about it?
I guess you believe that it's just a massively improbably coincidence that the Democratic voters are getting picked off in hugely disproportionate numbers in battleground states. Can we please use common sense here? Of course our lame brained media will spin it so they aren't blaming the Republicans - they never do. The Republicans face no accountability in the media.
The truth is both sides bear some guilt here. They always do. No one is ever spotless on a huge issue. The question is who does it more? As you can see below, we've got millions and millions being purged by Republicans and Palast also found the Democrats were complicit in ONE instance.
"GREG PALAST: Well, that’s the problem, is that we have millions and millions and millions of people being purged off the voter rolls, like in the state of Colorado, it was stunning to find out that one in five voters had their names simply erased by the Republican secretary of state. And then George Bush found—picked her out and made her the head of the US Elections Assistance Commission, as—you know, our joke in the comic book is that Bush wanted to name her “purgin’ general,” but Rove said it was a bit too much. So, this is one of the big problems.
You’re going to have millions of people walk into the voting booth, if you’re in Colorado, especially in New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan—if you have any foreclosure problems, anything, they’re going to tell you you can’t vote, and they’re going to try to either get you out of the voting booth or give you a provisional ballot. And what we’re trying to tell you is how you can, in effect, steal it back.
So, look, Kennedy and I are coming out with an exposé in Rolling Stone next week on the massive theft of the vote in November. And we were kind of shaken up about it, because—so, Jesse Jackson recommended to us, said, “Look, that’s so grim. You’re going to discourage people from voting. They’re going to say there’s no chance. So you’ve got to do something.” So what we did is we—you know, facing a democracy crisis in America, we did what you have to do, which is to create a comic book. And it’s twenty-four pages of full color with the idea that it tells you—it gives you the Rolling Stone story, with Ted Rall and other great comics laying it out, but then also telling you how you—you know, how you steal it back. And so, we have six ways that they’re stealing the election, but then seven ways you can steal it back.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of the things that we were talking as the film was playing, the—you’re not often getting Democratic leaders in some of these states really raising a ruckus about this issue.
GREG PALAST: Oh, yeah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And why is that? In terms of your investigations, for instance, in New Mexico, you mentioned that some of the Democratic leaders were willing to go along with these kinds of purges.
GREG PALAST: Well, as—you know, why don’t Democrats stand up? For the same reason as jellyfish. They don’t—you know, invertebrates, but—or as my co-author, Kennedy, said, they’re cowards. But, you know, he’s true blue. I’m not a Democrat. And, by the way, the guide is totally nonpartisan, so you—which means you can take it into the booth with you, by the way, to protect yourself, the Steal Back Your Vote comic.
And why don’t the Democrats protect voters? Because they’re in on the game. As you saw in New Mexico, you had Democratic Party officials knocking off the Native American vote, which is huge in New Mexico. It’s a swing vote in New Mexico. And they’re all Democrats—Native Americans—almost to a one. But they wanted to stop a uranium mine locally, and so the local policy want their baksheesh from the uranium mine are knocking off Native American votes. We see this in Colorado, we see this in Florida, where local Democratic officials are in on the purge, in on the game, trying to block the low-income minority voters. There are so many dangers now for the new voter, for the minority voter, for the elderly voter. There are so many tricks that they’re using now. It’s not one thing.
You know, I think a lot of people remember me from busting open the Florida purge of 2000 when Katherine Harris said that thousands of black folk were felons, when their only crime was voting while black. You know, that was kind of the magic bullet they gave in Florida. Kennedy, my co-author of the comic book and Rolling Stone article, showed how they stole Ohio.
Now what we see is a nationwide kind of Floridation of the nation, under something called the Help America Vote Act, because, you know, Bush is now trying to help us vote. It’s under the Help America Vote Act, where it’s like a whole series of things. So we have the mass purges. We have new ID laws.
How many new voters in America that have just signed up and all of those Obamaniacs realize that if you mail in your ballot on a first-time vote, almost every state requires you to also include a photocopy of your government ID? Obama is going to lose a million votes from absentee ballots which are mailed in without ID. It’s a new requirement. They don’t tell you that. In some cases, like Kentucky, you’ve got to serve—you have to notarize it. I mean, it’s completely out of control, the mass purging.
But there are things—I don’t want—again, I got to go back to Jesse Jackson’s admonition: don’t be discouraged. In fact, you should be encouraged. You should have the courage to now protect your vote. "
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/9/greg_palast_on_vote_rigging_and
I commented on the article YOU posted ... which said NONE of what you said in your own post.
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