Can of ACORN

The very serious John Danforth and Warren Rudman held a press event at the National Press Club today to stoke the fears of "voter fraud", absent any proof but lots of innuendo.

The controversy goes to revelations in recent days that canvassers for ACORN, a community organizing group, have turned in large numbers of fraudulent voter registration forms, including some where a potential voter has registered multiple times. Others include the names of cartoon characters and the Dallas Cowboys football team. The Republican Party and supporters of McCain say that Obama has several ties to ACORN, whose acronym stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Rudman said that he and Danforth are not accusing ACORN's leaders of wrong-doing. In Cuyahoga County and elsewhere, the problem has been blamed largely on people paid by ACORN to register new voters. With quotas to fill, they have used such tactics as offering money and cigarettes to people who signed multiple registration cards, according to testimony in Cleveland yesterday.

Obama should ask ACORN to stop employing people with criminal records, the pro-McCain former senators said today.

Democrats and some voting officials have said that systems already exist to catch fraudulent voters, including requirements for voters to show identification. But Danforth and Rudman said the systems rely on human judgment.

The fraudulent registrations, they said, create potential for people voting who should not; for people voting more than once, and for election officials to have to spend so much time on this that they cannot prepare properly for an orderly election on Nov. 4. The spread of absentee voting in this election makes the chances of fraudulent voting greater, they said.

"When you swamp a system with many, many fraudulent names, you're creating a problem," Danforth said.

This is a ridiculous controversy. People named Mickey Mouse don't show up to vote. The problem with having Mickey Mouse on the voter rolls, which would never happen anyway considering that ACORN FLAGS THE SUSPECT REGISTRATIONS THEMSELVES, is exactly nothing. Nobody shows up, nothing happens. There are simply no credible accounts of widespread voter fraud. It's a problem in search of an example.

This of course hasn't stopped the right from their pathetic shrieking that somehow, Mickey Mouse is going to vote 150,000 times and steal the election. In Indiana the Republican Secretary of State, the guy who pushed through the onerous voter ID law, is investigating ACORN for voter fraud. A similar circumstance is happening in Ohio.

Faulty registrations are a minor problem, but as I've said before, Republicans don't want to fix that. Every year, right-wing ballot initiatives turn out HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of faulty signatures, and yet this kind of furor never happens. They want a scapegoat out there.

The fact that John McCain stood with ACORN in 2006 is of no consequence to them.



ACORN is an organization that helps poor people and minorities, and in electoral politics, registers poor people to vote. You can imagine why that would be so threatening to Republicans.

UPDATE: Fox News has taken this to a ridiculous level.