Smeared for registering voters

DURING WEDNESDAY'S presidential debate, John McCain warned that there were shadowy forces "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history...maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

It was a shocking charge, and McCain naturally followed up by claiming that Barack Obama was responsible somehow.

But this is a scandal manufactured by Republican operatives involving a favorite target: ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

ACORN has a long record of grassroots organizing around issues like affordable housing and a living wage. Even Republicans occasionally promote its efforts--including a certain senator from Arizona. As ACORN National President Maude Hurd pointed out on October 15, representatives of the group worked with none other than John McCain, appearing with him at a February 20, 2006 immigration reform event. "It is clear for us to see that John McCain was for ACORN before he was against ACORN," Hurd said in a statement.

But come election time, the Republicans like to make ACORN a scapegoat in their complaints about voter fraud--a tactic explicitly designed to suppress the turnout for Democratic candidates.

The Republicans' smear campaign revolves around ACORN's voter registration drive. The group hired some 13,000 part-time canvassers to help register 1.3 million voters in 21 states. According to ACORN's Kevin Whelan, "The vast majority were dedicated workers who did a great job, who worked in the hot sun, who worked in the rain and who did something remarkable in bringing in all these new voters."

However, there were a "handful of cases" in which canvassers made up names or duplicate cards.

In these cases, ACORN itself reported the errors. By law, ACORN was required to turn in the forms, but flagged them so that election officials would see the problems. The other option was for ACORN to sift through the registration cards, picking which to submit, and tossing the rest--hardly a democratic process. But this is the basis of the Republican claim that ACORN--and, by extension, the Democrats--were trying to get Mickey Mouse registered to vote by turning in a card.

This isn't the first time that the Republicans have gone after ACORN. The GOP accused the group of voter fraud in 2004 and 2006, when it registered some 1.6 million voters--most of them poor and/or minorities.

In fact, the Bush administration fired U.S. Attorneys David Iglesias, Todd Graves and John McKay for refusing to prosecute "voter fraud" charges against ACORN. Their firings helped force the resignations of Bush adviser Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Factcheck.org reported that Dan Satterberg, the Republican prosecuting attorney in King County, Wash., where the 2006 ACORN case was prosecuted, said:

[A] joint federal and state investigation has determined that this scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting. Instead, the defendants cheated their employer...It was hardly a sophisticated plan: The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets, looking for unregistered voters...[It] appears that the employees of ACORN were not performing the work that they were being paid for, and to some extent, ACORN is a victim of employee theft.

IF ANYONE knows something about fixing votes, it's the Republicans--they have a rich history of it.

Most spectacularly, George W. Bush is president today because the Republicans stole the 2000 election in Florida. Hundreds of thousands of voters--many of them African Americans--were turned away at the polls because Republicans matched their names to a list of ex-felons. Then, when the final tally came under dispute, the Bush team used every trick in the book to make sure there wasn't a full recount.

In addition to cleansing voter lists of felons and alleged felons, another method regularly used is checking the rolls or new registrations against federal and state databases, such as Social Security and driver's license lists, and eliminating voters whose middle names don't match.

In Milwaukee, Wis., nearly 2,700 voters could already be scrubbed from the registration lists--1 percent of Milwaukee's population--after the Milwaukee Elections Commission hired a consulting firm to check the addresses of registered voters against U.S. Postal Service records.

In September, it was reported that the chair of the Republican Party organization in Macomb County, Mich., tried to flag people whose homes had been foreclosed and keep them from voting.

Then there's outright physical intimidation. According to a September 8 e-mail obtained by the Obama campaign and forward to the press, Wisconsin's Republican Party director of Election Day operations, Jon Waclawski, was seeking "Milwaukee area veterans, policemen, security personnel, firefighters, etc." to work as "poll-watchers on Election Day at inner-city (more intimidating) polling places."

The Republican are up in arms about ACORN's supposed attempt to "steal" the election, but racist disenfranchisement and intimidation are their bread and butter.