For a minute, forget the difference between voter fraud and registration fraud and the history of ACORN-bashing as voter suppression.
Has anyone stopped to consider whether the Republican National Congressional Committee’s allegations against ACORN make any sense? It seems not.
1. ACORN wants more poor people to vote. The more eligible people sign up to vote, the better, as far as ACORN is concerned. There is no shortage of eligible but unregistered voters.
2. ACORN pays people to gather signatures.
3. ACORN gives signature gatherers a daily quota to ensure that they are actually registering real poor people who aren’t already signed up, instead of goofing off.
4. Some signature gatherers allegedly fabricated voter registrations and/or knowingly signed up the same person multiple times in order to defeat ACORN’s quota system.
5. Voter registration fraud is fraud against ACORN. If these allegations are true, some unscrupulous signature gatherers are getting paid to register voters and not doing so. You would think the NRCC would be delighted to see people stealing from ACORN and ignoring real, unregistered poor people.
The NRCC is claiming that ACORN is committing voter fraud. In fact, the alleged offenses constitute registration fraud, of the type described above. Voter fraud is when one person somehow gets more than one vote. Nobody is going to show up and vote as "Mickey Mouse." Registering to vote twice with the same information won’t enable anyone to vote twice. ACORN has no reason to encourage phony signature gathering. On the contrary, the fake and double registrations are cover for the fact that signature gatherers aren’t registering voters.
"It is very difficult to ascribe any other motive to the activities of ACORN other than to swamp the system with registration cards," Republican National Committee Chief Counsel Sean Cairncross told the Washington Post. Can anyone think of why ACORN would pay good money to swamp the voting system with registration cards to nowhere?
4 Comments
Spotlight
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL Action
Advanced search
It is not important to the Reps that the story makes sense or be true.
They just need to outrage their base by being “victimized” by the left.
I just posted this on another blog but it’s relevant here. I think that it should be pointed out the amount of signature fraud perpetrated by Republicans in the initiative and referendum process…all without any charges of fraud or fines. In fact, Secretary of States simply “accept” very high levels of false signatures as an acceptable cost of encouraging participatory democracy in the case of these initiatives. The certainly aren’t sending DOJ or FBI agents out raiding and shutting down the initiative groups!
The Ward Connelly-sponsored Initiative (in McCain’s home state of Arizona)
to end any State support of schools that allow clubs, groups or scholarships based upon ethnicity.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/…..llot2.html
“Secretary of State Jan Brewer said she disqualified Proposition 104, the “Arizona Civil Rights Initiative,” because its 194,961 valid signatures fell short of the 230,047 required for proposed amendments to the Arizona Constitution. Supporters had turned in just under 334,735 signatures.”
So lemme see only 194,961 of 334,735 signatures were actually valid!
That’s a 42% False signature rate! I wonder how many people involved in this massive effort of fraud were ever jailed or even fined. Were THEIR offices raided? Yet ACORN who actually flagged and notified the Secretary of State about questionable registrations gets raided by Republican-appointed AG’s? They’ve essentially shut down voter registration operations in many areas…just as the registration deadlines loom!
This is a pattern of fraud that can be found in almost every state where such right-wing backed initiatives are attempted to be placed on the ballot. In many cases the signature collectors actually deceive people to sign right-wing backed petitions by “rubber-banding” initiatives above that are less controversial, and then telling people that they have to sign twice, or three times.
For the sake of fairness, Republican Goobernors should do what JEB did in 2000 in Florida – set up vehicle road blocks and check points in poor neighborhoods on the routes to the polls.
ACORN held a press conference today where they denied either assigning their signature collectors a quota. It was quite interetsing, I was actually quite surprised when the spokesman denied it.
I tried to link the video but it wouldn’t link, the link is to the Cspan recent programs page, the press conference is there and lasts 45 minutes. The Q&A at the last 15 minutes or so is the best.
fwiw, This is the link to it: rtsp://video1.c-span.org/archive/c08/c08_101408_acorn.rm