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MORE ON ACORN.
I know I've been blogging about this a lot lately, but I want to make a few things clear. It is entirely possible, even probable, that some ACORN employees are guilty of registration fraud. But this does not mean that there was a "conspiracy" to commit registration fraud, and here's why.
If you believe that ACORN is a left leaning group that wants to see a Democrat elected, turning in a bunch of fraudulent forms hurts them rather than helps them. Because of federal ID requirements for first time voters, there's no way for them to take advantage of bad registrations, even if they wanted to. ACORN's best bet for swinging the election is to legally register people to vote. Which is why deliberately flooding states with bad registrations isn't in their interest. They are legally compelled to turn in every filled out registration card they get, so tossing the bad ones isn't even an option.
The question is, who benefits from turning in fraudulent registrations? Two groups actually. The registration workers who are stealing time from their employers by not doing their jobs, and the Republican Party, which has done an incredible job of convincing people that registration fraud is a serious threat to the election. They also benefit from using allegations of registration fraud to push for the use of ineffective and error prone matching criteria to challenge the eligibility of first time voters. By casting doubt on ACORN, they hamper the efforts of a liberal voter registration group that is probably increasing the number of Obama leaning-voters in battleground states.
The only party that doesn't benefit from fraudulent registrations is ACORN.
--A. Serwer
COMMENTS (4)
There's a difference between registration fraud and vote fraud.
Vote fraud is a big myth.
Only handful of cases have ever been proven and prosecuted.
Nobody is suggesting the Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts are perfect.
But the Right-wing screeching over nefarious doings in Ohio (where Freddie Johnson of Cleveland testified that ACORN encouraged him to sign 73 voter-registration forms—all in his own name) overlooks the fact that all 73 registrations would still have allowed Freddie to vote just once.
John McCain and his overheated friends deliberately undermine voter confidence.
That is the point.
It encourages citizens to accede to ever-harsher voter-verification laws—even if they are not needed. Harsher laws and regulations will only be used to futher disenfranchise voters
Even if Mr. Mouse is registered to vote, he still needs to show up at his polling place, provide a fake ID, and risk a felony conviction to do so.
Posted by: tx | October 17, 2008 1:47 PM
So what you are saying is, if there may be a "conspiracy" to commit registration fraud it's likely to have been committed by Republicans since they are the only organized group likely to benefit from this conspiracy?
I can see that. How hard would it be for them to get ringers to sign-up for these $8 an hour jobs? And unless you had multiple saboteurs within a single Federal district, with the different US Attorneys involved, it would be tough to detect a pattern. One GOP "rat-fucker" per each of the 14 states that ACORN is being investigated in? This is well within the capabilities of the party of Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.
Posted by: The Other Ed | October 17, 2008 2:08 PM
There might be something worse going on here. They might try to push for a law saying that organizations that register people to vote must discard the fraudulent forms. Sounds reasonable, right? They would avoid wasting the time of election officials. But there's a reason why those laws are in place. In the past, there had been problems of people collecting registrations and throwing out the ones that registered for the wrong party. People thought they were registered, but got turned away from the polls when it was too late. I think the Republicans want to go back to those days.
Posted by: fostert | October 17, 2008 2:40 PM
Of course, the subtext of all of this is that the Republicans are not vulnerable to this kind of attack because their whole strategy is to keep voting numbers down. The Republican party is anti-democratic at the most basic level.
Posted by: Virginia | October 17, 2008 2:58 PM