ACORN and Voter Fraud

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been on top of Republican voter suppression efforts for years. It was TPM -- with the help of TPM readers across the country, who reported on U.S. Attorney firings in their own states -- who broke the U.S. Attorney firing scandal.

The background on the scandal was that Karl Rove understood that for Republicans to stay in office, it would be necessary to suppress voting by groups of people who were not likely to vote for Republicans. You know who those groups of people are. U.S. Attorneys were asked to investigate reports of voter fraud, and prosecute the people involved. Sounds fine, but what the attorneys found was that there was really nothing going on, and that their scant resources would be better used prosecuting real crimes.

That was not the response the Bush White House was looking for. It didn't matter if there were real crimes being committed; what mattered was that people engaged in voter registration drives be intimidated and vilified. So if a U.S. Attorney was not willing to follow his or her political marching orders, a replacement would be made.

It is possible that a former Attorney General will go to prison for this -- though not for the crime, for the cover-up.

And that brings us to the current brouhaha about ACORN. Josh has written an excellent essay on the subject here. If you have to deal with wingnuts in your workplace, I certainly recommend giving it a good read. A taste:

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 [sic; sorry, Josh] they actually signed up.

The Obama campaign is starting to talk about this nonsense:

In a conference call with reporters, campaign manager David Plouffe called the charge that ACORN was illegally registering voters (and that Obama had nefarious ties to the organization) a cynical "smokescreen" and an attempt to discourage people from going to the polls.

"This is just the start of what is going to be a very deliberate and cynical attempt to try and create confusion and challenge people inappropriately," he said. "They clearly, strategically, believe the more people who vote in this election, the less their chances are [for victory]."

But in a later essay, Josh had it right. This ACORN nonsense not about this election, it's about the next election:

Let's be clear about what this is. These are random stories about fake vote registrations. The Drudges and Fox scoundrels of the world seem to think that if someone fills out a voter registration card for Mickey Mouse, that Mickey Mouse might show up and cast a vote they're not entitled to cast. It doesn't and there is zero evidence of any voter fraud or anything that would make voter fraud more likely. The level of lying, bad faith or at best ignorance of the people making these claims is really beyond imagining. This isn't vote fraud. There's no evidence of vote fraud. Nothing. This is an effort of a losing political party to a) lay the groundwork for challenging their defeat at the polls b) lay the groundwork to pass laws to make it harder for poor people and minorities to vote.

Pay particular attention to a). Then pray that Obama wins in a blow-out, because if it's at all close, you'll look back on the 2000 post-election with a sense of nostalgia.