When I put together my blog on how the republicans could steal the election, I figured some conservatives would comment about ACORN or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. So I have to write a blog on ACORN because it's a complex issue that has been toxically simplified by the corporate media (plural noun), which include Fox News and CNN and are spreading the conservative spin about ACORN and they are assisting McCain in his sleezy campaign. This blog will demonstrate why the ACORN issue is BOGUS and is being used to camouflage the republicans widespread efforts to suppress votes of low-income and African-American voters. 

ACORN appears to be target 1 of the GOP campaign against Senator Obama, surpassing even a focus on William Ayers. The claims are that ACORN is engaging in massive voter fraud through its voter registration activities. Of course it's only natural that a key culprit in the stealing of the 2004 election from Kerry would be whining about ACORN on Fox News. This hypocrite would happen to be Ken Blackwell, VOTER SUPPRESSION GURU who disenfranchised Democratic voters in his dual role as Ohio Secretary of State and chair of George Bush's Ohio campaign in 2004.

As McCain's campaign continues to plummet, the ACORN story is being used along with Ayers to smear Obama to elect McBush who can't win on this issues. So the right-wing media are going ga-ga trying to tie Senator Obama to ACORN, a group that has been under investigation for its voter registration activities. But the real point appears to be part of a broader Republican strategy to remove likely Democratic voters from the voter rolls and to lay the groundwork to contest the outcome of the presidential election in the event of an extremely close result in a battleground state.

But we should resist the temptation to chalk up this ACORN obsession to just another guilt-by-association campaign tactic. For the last three elections, Republicans have been ramping up cries of voter fraud as a way of undermining the legitimacy of the election results should they not turn out in their favor and providing a reason for strict voting purges that are likely to remove many Democratic voters from the rolls.

With the polls showing the McCain campaign consistently lagging, it is raising the ACORN issue among others to see if it sticks. In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called "Motor Voter," Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995. (For more about Barack's career, check out our Obama bio.)

The whole point of ACORN, aside from attempting to smear Obama, is to steal yet another election from the democrats and put McLame in office. We saw the voter fraud call in 2004, when Republicans virtually guaranteed that they would have challenged the presidential election results if John Kerry won and the results turned on the outcome in New Mexico, which Republicans said was rife with voter fraud. (Don't forget that this unsubstantiated concern drove the U.S. attorneys scandal.) We saw it with the activities of the American Center for Voting Rights, a Republican-aligned group that promoted the unsubstantiated claims of impersonation voter fraud in an often-successful effort to enact voter identification laws. We see it now with the reissuance of John Fund's book, Stealing Elections, full of anecdote but virtually no evidence of systematic voter fraud that can lead to a change in the outcome of elections. (The kind of fraud that leads to changes in election outcomes has been with absentee votes, which have mostly been ignored in these efforts.) And just try doing a Google News search for the term "voter fraud." You will see people who believe that foreign money is flooding the Obama campaign, that Obama is not a natural born citizen, and that the election will be stolen through voter fraud.

This is the reason that the ACORN controversy is a godsend to the Republicans. It fits into their meme that the election of Obama would be illegitimate and procured by fraud.

ACORN has been very active in registering voters, especially in big cities and in battleground states. It hires low income workers to do the registration (part of a way of providing additional employment for these workers), and there have been numerous documented cases of ACORN workers turning in fraudulent registration forms. These problems have led to convictions and new investigations---including a raid earlier this week in Nevada (which, by the way, has a Democratic Secretary of State).

But the important point now is that fraudulent registrations put in by ACORN employees are not going to lead to fraud at the polls

as Governor Danforth recently claimed in a conference call with reporters. Why else would ACORN submit phony registration forms if not to game the outcome of the election, he asked. The answer is simply that these employees want to keep their jobs. And it is worse if employees are pressured to meet quotas to turn in a certain number of forms, something ACORN denies it is doing.

So this is why Terrell Owens and his teammates from the Dallas Cowboys have been found on forms in Nevada. This type of comical error will not affect the election outcome.There have been no cases of phony voter registrations leading to the casting of votes in any election that have been on any large scale--much less affected the outcome of elections. So we should all agree that those who submit fraudulent voter registration forms should be punished criminally, but that such activity is not going to affect the outcome of the presidential election: Obama is running way ahead in the polls, and if he wins in a landslide it is not because Tony Romo has voted thousands of times in key swing states.

Maybe CNN should mention that ACORN is required by most states to turn in all the voter registration forms they receive. This includes Indiana, the focus of CNN's Drew Griffin's report.  Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Indiana Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found many were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed "Johns, Jimmy" using the address of a Jimmy John's sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar's offices have come across similar problems in recent days.

CNN fails to report that ACORN flags registration cards that are incomplete and problematic.

What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. [...]

The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John's card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. "It's certainly true. They did have three batches separated." she told me this morning. "There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info -- like no voter ID number or a missing birthday -- and another batch they called 'suspicious.' "

With ACORN falsely blamed for fraud, the stage is set for the stealing the election from Obama.

But cries of voter fraud allow for harsh purging of voters from the rolls. Because of decentralization of election authority and a lack of administrative competence or will, the rolls are inaccurate in many states. Careless purging--driven by unsubstantiated fears about voter fraud--can lead to many eligible voters being incorrectly removed from the polls. Despite the fact that eligible voters are being removed from the polls, the GOP is pushing for more purging in Ohio, and they found a sympathetic federal judge, citing ACORN's activities, in requiring the Democratic Secretary of State to allow county elections board to purge of many new Ohio voters who do not have an exact match in inaccurate databases.

And if the election comes down to the counting of provisional ballots cast in a state like Colorado, look out. We can expect to see James Baker back on television, this time demanding that the results be changed in McCain's favor because of massive voter fraud. From little ACORNs can come mighty lawsuits.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman give a detailed listing of voter suppression efforts of the republicans--purging, caging, and vote count rigging.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3229

With just over three weeks until election day, the Republicans have mounted an all-out attack against newly registered voters and the organizations working to sign them up. As many as 75% of these new voters are expected to vote Democratic, but the attacks have also spread to long-established voters as well. Recent calculations show more than a million more newly registered Democrats in Ohio than Republicans.

The usual drumbeat claiming massive voter fraud has become ceaseless at Fox "News" and other right wing media mouthpieces.

As expected, the assault centers in Ohio, which once again could decide the presidency, but has manifested throughout the nation:

1) A Republican sheriff in Greene County, Ohio, has demanded social security and other records from 302 local voters whose ballots he apparently wants to negate. Sheriff Gene Fischer has requested registration cards and address forms for all Greene County residents who voted in a special session established in Ohio allowing new voters to register and vote on the same day. The process was challenged in court by the GOP. The Ohio Supreme Court turned down that challenge, and allowed the same-day voting to proceed. But now Fischer claims telephone calls complaining about the potential for voter fraud have prompted him to go after the information.

In Franklin County, home of Ohio State University, Columbus State Community College, Capital University, Ohio Dominican University, and Otterbein College, election protection observers are reporting continuing surveillance by Republicans at Veterans Memorial, the site for early voting. The observers have documented Republican operatives taking photographs and writing down license plate numbers of voters. Election activists expect similar criminal charges as in Greene County to be filed in the state's capital.

Greene County is home to Wright State, Central State, Wilberforce and Cedarville Universities, along with Antioch College, which was recently put out of business by a right-wing putsch on its board of directors.

Llyn McCoy, Greene County's deputy elections director, says names, telephone and Social Security numbers will be blacked out of any records handed over to the Sheriff. According to McCoy, the Sheriff says he has no evidence of voter fraud other than phone calls stating fraud was a possibility. It is widely assumed that the same-day registration/voting option was exercised primarily by students who lean heavily Democratic. In 2004, African-American students from Wright State, Central State and Wilberforce were regularly challenged on their registration credentials and forced to endure waiting in lines to vote for hours. Students at Cedarville, a Christian school, made no such reports. Sheriff Fischer's targeting of historically black college students, the core of Obama-mania, is intended to send a chilling effect through the ranks of these Democratic voters.

2) U.S. District Court Judge George C. Smith, a Reagan appointee, has approved a GOP lawsuit demanding that the state give county boards of elections great leeway in attacking new voter registration forms. The decision, framed under the Help America Vote Act, would allow Republican challengers access to data from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security agency to challenge new voters. The Judge noted that Ohio law permits challenges to absentee ballots, thousands of which have been pouring in to elections boards. If allowed to stand, it could give the GOP the right to shred ballots already cast in the Buckeye State, with the precedent possibly being used to further enable a GOP nationwide disenfranchisement campaign. Smith gave Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner a week to respond. Brunner has stated she will appeal.

3) Before the ruling, Brunner announced at the close of registration that the number of registered voters in Ohio had jumped by 665,949, from 7,518,189 active voters on January 1, 2008, to 8,184,138 active voters now. About 5.4 million votes were officially counted in Ohio's 2004 presidential election. Then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell certified a Bush victory of less than 119,000 votes. A massive GOP disenfranchisement campaign could easily exceed that margin.

4) The New York Times has reported that boards of elections in at least nine crucial states, including Ohio, have violated federal law in conducting purges and have been illegally using Social Security data bases as part of those purges. The Times' Ian Urbina quotes Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman as asking the Colorado Attorney-General to review how some 2,500 citizens were removed from the registration lists there. The Times has cited purges in Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan that have apparently been conducted within 90 days of the upcoming November 4 election, violating federal law that allows states to expunge only those who have been convicted of a felony, moved out of state or died.

5) The Times has also reported that boards of elections in Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio have illegally used federal Social Security databases to flag and possibly eliminate voters whose registration applications were suspected of irregularities. The Times reported some 37,000 Colorado voters removed in the three weeks after July 21; Secretary Coffman said the number was 14,000.

6) Michigan elections director Christopher Thomas said his state had removed about 11,000 voters in August, while the Times estimated the real number to be closer to 33,000. Thomas refused to make the purged files public. Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land is a long-standing Republican partisan whose political activism traces back to the mid-70s when she worked for Gerald Ford's campaign in high school. Critics charge that she functions in the traditional of Florida's Katherine Harris and Ohio's J. Kenneth Blackwell.

7) North Carolina's BOE director Gary Bartlett dismissed concerns raised by the Social Security Administration about possible mis-used of SS files to purge registrations there in conjunction with drivers licenses. The SSI contends Social Security numbers can only be accessed when there is no drivers license or other form of state ID available.

8) A CBS News report has revealed organized caging attempts by the GOP to eliminate registered voters from the rolls in 19 states. The report marks one of the first initiated by a corporate news organization isolating Republican anti-vote campaigning.

9) An electronic voting machine in New Mexico was found to be operating on faulty software which could have eliminated hundreds of votes. The glitch was apparently corrected, but was of a type that could result in thousands of votes being lost on Election Day 2008, as they were in 2000 and 2004.

10) Fitrakis and Wasserman note how ACORN has come under serious attack in Nevada, Missouri, Ohio and elsewhere from Republicans attempting to negate the thousands of generally low-income citizens ACORN has registered to vote. As a matter of law, ACORN is required to report irregular registrations that come through its process. But GOP operatives have equated these with "fraudulent" filings, and a have ramped up a smear and fear campaign aimed at negating thousands of legitimate ACORN registrants throughout the US.


11) The GOP continues to resist attempts to subpoena Michael Connell, a shady Republican computer operative who programmed the 2000 Bush-Cheney web site. Connell was also hired by former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in 2004 to tabulate the Ohio vote count. Under Connell, Ohio's vote totals were shunted to a computer bank in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that housed the servers of the Republican National Committee. In the early hours of the morning after election day, vote totals mysteriously began shifting from Kerry to Bush, swinging the 2004 election. Connell's cyber-security industry colleague Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican and former McCain supporter, has said that Connell may be able to shed light on vote count rigging in the 2008 vote count as well. Attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit have thus far been unable to secure Connell's sworn testimony.

12) CNN has reported that Obama's surging poll numbers may leave him "in position to steal Virginia from the GOP." Virginia hasn't backed a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but CNN's use of the word "steal" has raised hackles among election protection activists who argue the flow of theft is in the other direction.

As the moment of truth arrives, McCain-Palin attacks based on race, alleged "terrorist" ties and more are sure to increasingly dominate the GOP campaign. But far more insidious will be an all-out assault on voter registration in the name of "voter fraud," and on finding new ways to undermine the national vote, most importantly on electronic voting machines of the kind programmed by Michael Connell.

If those supporting the democratic process are not exceedingly vigilant, the GOP could use these tactics to once again take the White House.
--
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of four books on election protection including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, and AS GOES OHIO, just published by www.freepress.org, where this article originally appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville lawsuit.

SOURCES:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-hasen/the-purge-surgewhy-the-go_b_133786.html

http://progressillinois.com/2008/10/10/vilifying-acorn-without-facts

http://fightthesmears.com/articles/20/acornrumor