That ACORN Nonsense

The voter registration group ACORN has a problem: It hires unemployed people to go out and register voters. These people working for ACORN apparently get paid by the number of voters they register. Therefore these workers sometimes tend not to be too discriminatory when registering people to vote; oftentimes the registrations are useless, duplicates, or downright fraudulent. It's the same problem ACORN has faced during every election since its founding almost 40 years ago.

Anyway, this year, ACORN apparently has submitted approximately 30,000 fraudulent voter registrations. Hence, the folks on Fox News, Michelle Malkin, Pajamas Media, and all of the similar Republican blogs are up in arms about ACORN and this "massive voter fraud". I haven't been watching, but it's apparently the number one news story if you are the kind of person who watches Fox News. Evidently, the story even made it as far as the right-leaning Wall Street Journal today.

Some points Fox News (et. al.) fails to mention:

One: The 30,000 registrations were out of a total of 1 million registrations submitted... about a 3% disqualification rate.

Two: ACORN checks each registration they get. However, by law ACORN must submit every registration they receive; they can't throw registrations away just because they might be (or are) fraudulent, although they do fire workers and have law enforcement charge those workers who are obviously "gaming the system". They submit the bad registrations to the registrar, but mark them as "questionable". The 30,000 fraudulent registrations this year were in part registrations that ACORN had marked as "questionable" before handing them in. Duplicate registrations, deceased voters, spelling errors, and incorrect addresses (a bit more difficult for ACORN to perfunctorily pick out) made up the rest. Fox News and company is basically accusing ACORN of committing a crime when ACORN was actually doing exactly what they were required by law to do.

Three: If some shifty ACORN workers convinced even a thousand people to register more than once to vote, that's one thing. (Is registering to vote twice even illegal?) However, shifty ACORN workers somehow convincing a thousand people to commit a felony by getting them to vote twice (with nothing in it for the people breaking the law) in the upcoming election is another thing altogether. Just because Mickey Mouse registers to vote doesn't mean that he's going to actually show up. Therefore: Even a ton of invalid voter registrations will almost certainly not lead to an ounce of "massive voter fraud."

Four: Why would ACORN voluntarily pay workers money for registrations that will almost certainly be rejected by the registrar, tarnish their image, and (as above, possibly) break the law? As above, unless those 30,000 disqualified voter registrations were expected to be used by 30,000 people (one of them in a mouse suit, apparently) to vote twice (and risk felony prosecution), it was a waste of money, and obviously only resulted in tons of bad publicity.

Five: Just so you know, this same argument about ACORN was brought up 4 years ago by Republicans (including Michelle Malkin) during the last election as well. The DOJ found no wrongdoing then, either.

Six: In addition, many of the individual accusations about ACORN that you are hearing on Fox News, which may seem credible, are actually made up. (ACORN "voter fraud" is even being reported in counties where ACORN wasn't even operating.) After 40 years in the business... after nearly a decade of being the #1 target for every Republican accusation of voter fraud... after registering millions of people to vote, why would ACORN risk their existence and their good work on hairball schemes that would at best (the above-mentioned election law and procedural hindrances notwithstanding) result in nothing more than a few thousand fraudulent votes?

Seven: Let's face facts. ACORN registers almost exclusively poor people to vote, primarily black people, mainly in cities. Who do you think one million poor, black, city people are going to vote for in this election? If you are a member of the Republican political machine facing a get-out-the-vote effort of such partisan magnitude, you wouldn't waste a second trying to do at least something about it... discredit it, slow it, hinder it... anything. Excluding the six previous bits of information, with this fact alone, you should have enough to suspect that this might be simply a page torn from the book of Dirty Election Tricks, and nothing more.

Eight: Since I take it upon myself to point out political hypocrisy when I see it, I'll add the following as a postscript parenthetical: (The Republicans are doing the "guilt-by-association" thing again, this time linking Obama to ACORN. Apparently he gave leadership seminars and did legal pro bono work and other dastardly things for the organization's branch in Chicago. So, just for the record, John McCain addressed an ACORN rally in 2006.)

So there it is: The ACORN nonsense that you've been hearing about, put in a little bit broader perspective. I hope it helps.