From Little ACORNS...
By Steve Hynd Tuesday Oct 14, 2008 6:00pmIt's a mystery, though, how voter registration fraud might turn into actual voter fraud, despite Palin's dark hintings. Brad Friedman, writing in the Guardian, makes the point well and says the whole ACORN kerfuffle is a massive GOP hoax:
Here are the facts. Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.
You'll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That's true. And we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.
What you won't hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at the county office to show an ID when they go to vote the first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won't be voting this November. You needn't worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically and dishonourably tries to mislead you.
Matt Yglesias adds:
... if you go out and register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people and also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.
In short, there's no actual voter fraud going on here, despite the fevered fervor of the loyal Right and implied but unstated accusations from the McCain-Palin camp.
There does seem to be a problem, though, with a percentage of voter registrations being turned in to ACORN by paid workers trying to game their system, one that the group is well aware of and has encouraged prosecutions of workers on. But it also appears to be a systemic problem. The group has had workers found guilty in the past of exactly the same kind of fraud attempts, going back to the 2004 election cycle and beyond. ACORN appears to get no benefit from these fraud attempts, but then again it doesn't exactly lose either. Donors are going to keep giving ACORN money in any case and so there's no real incentive to amend practises.
It's exactly the same problem found in Western aid agencies in the Third World, where corruption, graft or just plain bad practises continue to be a problem year after year because no-one in a decision-making capacity with the agency feels any pain. We've seen the same problem recently in the financial sector with big-earning executives pocketbooks untouched by their own mismanagement. The solution, as always, is one only the group itself can implement - tighten hiring practises and rearrange the group's internal rules so that paid execs lose money when their workers try to pull a fast one. That'll give them an incentive to winnow out the fraudsters aggressively and at an early stage.
But if that's all the fire there is behind the smoke and mirrors show, why are the Republicans making so much of it? (And why haven't they aggressively sought their own voter registration drives if ACORN is so partisanly biased? The GOP still gladly accepts any Republican registrations ACORN turns in - you betcha!)
Well, one of the factors is that ACORN is just the kind of group Republicans love to target. The WSJ article linked above makes that plain in its third paragraph.
Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform.
Obviously in league with Satanic Forces, then.
It's a useful scapegoat for Republican culpability in the current financial meltdown too. ACORN has been called a "major contributor" to the crisis because of its advocacy for loans for minorities on easier terms. But while it's true that a bad loan is a bad loan no matter what color your skin is, and that the Reagan "ownership society" was always a scam to put your money into the financial sector's pockets that too many liberals fell into, the subprime crisis was mostly caused by lending houses working far beyond the guidelines even ACORN was happy with and ACORN tried to reign in such predatory lending. Nor did the group have anything to do with the creation of the"toxic debt" problem - leveraging securities at 30 or even 40 to one over their already dubious face value - which turned a big problem into a $500 trillion plus worldwide disaster. That was entirely down to conseravtive-pushed removal of legislation governing such transactions.
Then there's the smoke screen the ACORN narrative, properly hyped up, provides for accounts of Republican voting irregularities. As blogger "Hotflash" at Show Me Progress writes:
the biggest part of must be to distract the media from the voter disenfranchisement that the GOP is busy quietly instigating. The New York Times reports:
States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows. The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.
Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters. .......
In three states - Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan - the number of people purged from the election rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeds the number who may have died or relocated during that period.
If and when that voter disenfranchisement ever gets traction in the MSM, we can expect lots of he said/she said. "You sliced our voters off the rolls!"/"You turned in fake registration cards!" Republicans hope that press stenographers will shrug and imply that both sides have been guilty.
And finally, ACORN provides a convenient excuse for diehard Republicans who cannot understand why the country can't stand them and is moving en masse away from their failed ideology, while at the same time providing an excuse for legal challenges to vote results. Scott Limeaux notes that if this were not the case, there'd be an easy solution.
...if for some reason it was critically important for virtually every single name collected in mass voter registration drives to be accurate, there's an obvious solution in effect in many other liberal democracies: have professionals trained by the government be responsible for ensuring that citizens are registered. Of course, we're not going to here about that remedy from people frothing at the mouth about ACORN because the point isn't to make registration a perfect process, but rather to use inevitable errors as a pretext to suppress legitimate voters. Since the Supreme Court has declared that you can do this even if there's literally no evidence that anyone in the state has fraudulently voted based on an erroneous registration, this is going to get worse before it gets better.
From little ACORNS, a multitude of excuses and narratives can grow.
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Reichwingers going nuts over ACORN?
Are y'all punning us?
)O(
Here's hoping they haven't done a thing wrong and this is one more desperate move made by a desperate party.
It's time to wake up and learn from the past. The election of 2000 was stolen from Gore and the Democrats in 2000. Do you think that the forces behind the Republicans have forgotten this? Why don't we see that the strategy is at work again. There will be challenges to voters in low income districts. There will be incredible delays in processing votes in some districts. There will be counter challenges made by Democrates that will be judged by Republican election officials and by Republican appointed judges. There will be people jamming the phone system so elderly voters are unable to call for rides. There is a well orchestrated effort being made now with "voter fraud issue" being aired to justify what is to follow, which is the real fraud, the real theft of democracy, the real theft of votes or suppression of Democratic votes, the real theft of the right to rule ourselves. The only real question is what we should do when it happens again?
we don't need to cheat. nice try!
This is OT.....BUT RED SOX SUCK How do you like the smell of My Rays ass? GO RAYS!
From little Acorns grow mighty oaks
From mcgramps little peanuts sprouts a stalk.
)O(
By Bertha Lewis, senior organizer for ACORN, and Steve Kest, ACORN's Executive Director:
The Truth About ACORN's Voter Registration Drive
Here’s One Squirrely Candidate Who CAN’T Find an ACORN
http://satiricalpolitical.com/?p=3988
The only ones interested in a non-existing crisis in voter registration are, you guessed it, the Republicans.
This is just another desperate tactic designed to distract, exaggerate a threat, manufacture a crisis, all with the ultimate goal to disenfranchise people in general and minorities in particular.
I predict that, just as with all the other failed smears that have come out of that nutcase Palin and her sidekick McSame, this one will fade into obscurity as well.
For the movie W, showing him on the toilet with the slogan a sitting president, shouldn't there be an h someplace?
)O(
This is How Fascism Comes, by Mark Wise:
http://www.slepton.com/slepton/viewcontent.pl...
Admit it-If a group like ACORN was affiliated with the Republican party, and using the same tacticts, everyone here would be screaming bloody murder.
Admit it-If a group like ACORN was affiliated with the Republican party, and using the same tacticts, everyone here would be screaming bloody murder.
I think most of us here know that even though there are bogus names on a voter registration form it doesn't mean those bogus names will even get close to a polling place let alone vote. God, makin' a mountain out of a fuckin' molehile and the masses on the right "buy the lie!" every frickin' time one is told to them. They wish things and then believe that because they wished it, it automatically becomes true. "POOF" Obama's the antichrist, "POOF" John McCain is making up ground in the polls! God they'll believe any shit shoveled their way cause they are incapable of accepting the fact that the repub party has pulled the wool over their eyes and they lose no matter what. Remember what bush said "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice duh, duh, won't get fooled again"! Hahahaahahaaahahahaha
The fact is, ACORN is not affiliated with the Democratic party, it is an independent, non-partisan community activist organization. They register Republicans as well as Independents and Democrats. There's no guarantee that the people the register will vote Democratic, in fact, I suspect many won't.
The real issue here, is voter suppression and a preemptive attempt to discredit the elections should they not go the Republican's way.
So I don't accept the claim that Democrats would be equally up in arms over a non-partisan organization registering voters.
repugs win when people dont go to the polls...not when they do
have you seen what acorn is acused of? registering mickey mouse and the entire dallas cowboys defensive team
when mickey shows up to vote...give me a call
until then, while acorn needs to get their act together...this doesnt mean shit
and i like the way that reich winger used a clip of hannity and blackwell....blackwell is a crook who should be behind bars...and even blackwell admitted it doesnt mean shit
and enough of connecting obama to a guy who died in the 70s...its retarded
Wow...Acorn is public enemy #1 according to these neofascists. These are dangerous times "my friends".
We’ve got major issues with voter disenfranchisement in contentious States, purging of voter rolls for having names that sound like felons, intentional “mismanagement” of district boundaries, illegal “canvassing” and fraudulent voter ballots, people not being able to vote because their mortgage is in default, and voting machines all over the country that consistently record votes that don’t exist or not at all - and they’re talking about ACORN.
ACORN! Registration cards with funny names on them of people who don’t exist and will never vote?
It kind’a ruins the trick if the magician TELLS YOU to ONLY look at his right hand as he slips the big white bunny rabbit out of his pocket with his left, but that is what is going on here. Pay attention to the man behind THAT curtain.
Voter fraud is so erratic and minimal that it doesn’t count. Voter REGISTRATION fraud is like measuring how much the ocean levels drop after you leave the surf. ELECTION FRAUD is all over the place – THAT COUNTS.
Bad magicians ruin the trick for everybody.
Seriously if it were we would all be guilted into "towing the line." I mean seriously, this day and age were all lying and carrying on like someones taking advantage of us, our system, our lives, but really.... REALLY.... its the us LETTING the system develop the way its developing. I mean seriously, you have to read this book America2014, and if you dont then you at least have to check out its altered bill of rights there free on www.america2014.com.
ACORN was founded in 1970 when Sarah was 6 years old and McCain was 34 years old. The ACORN program was so good even Senator McCain who was a keyspeaker in 2006 spoke of how proud and honored he was to speak and how he supports the program. Those days are gone now as McCain/Palin aren't getting votes from those who are getting services. Now if ACORN would tell all those people they service that they had to vote for McCain/Palin things would be different. Yes McCain is racist but ask for black votes if he got those votes his first action as President would get rid of the Civil Rights bill and order every minortiy has to have an owner and the South would rise again. Sarah would finally sign a Bill to get that Miss Alaska crown for the black woman that beat her.
This has made me forget all about my house that was repossessed, my credit rating that's in the tank, my job that was sent over overseas and my child that was killed in Iraq in a war based on 911 so Halliburton could get no bid government contracts at my expense.
Thanks wingnut youtuber!
ACORN is a perfect scapegoat for Republicans because they can falsely blame it for the financial meltdown, their disastrous coming defeat in November and tie it to democrats and the likely new president Barack Obama. While at the same time this made up ACORN madness covers up the real election fraud perpetrated by (mostly) Republicans.
Obama will very likely win but because of voter caging and other Republican election theft tricks it will be closer than the polls show. And the right will then go nuts and claim Obamas winning margin is made up of fake ACORN votes
I suspect November will get real messy
that there was only 1 record of voter fraud in the past 5 years, but their buddies were convicted of Election fraud in Cuyahoga.
Well there was that Ann Coulter incident. Don't you recall all the rightwingnuts screaming bloody murder at the horror of voter registration fraud back when she was being investigated? Remember? Yeah, me neither.
In short, there's no actual voter fraud going on here, despite the fevered fervor of the loyal Right and implied but unstated accusations from the McCain-Palin camp.
The Secretary of State, Todd Rokita, has been all over the news in Indiana claiming outright that ACORN is involved in voter fraud. So far, I haven't seen or heard any news outlet in our state, including public radio, dispute his false claims. They're uniformly repeating his accusations verbatim with no counter information. All I've heard on our public broadcasting for the past three days is recordings of Rokita with no counterpoint.
In the political game of poker the Dem's ACORN hand is a pair of deuces compared to the DIEBOLD hand held by the Republicans.
It's strange that a party and mindset that is so humorless can be the provider of such fantastic ironies.
just saying
i really hate that sanctamonious prick
and the wsj has no cred anymore
they...the cheerleaders of the bush economic plan...dont know squat about anything
It's now owned by Rupert Murdoch. Talk about a credibility gap!
Just over a decade ago, I ran a voter registration drive for one of ACORN's non-profit affiliates. I have to say, my personal experience was a huge displeasure. I did see a lot of corruption within the local branch, but none of it had to do with voter registration.
Actually, we did have a voter registration fraud scandal. I had hired many people to help register voters throughout a particular locality. We paid them by the registration, which was legal in the jurisdiction. One woman was, at first, a dynamite activist, learning everything I taught her about approaching neighbors, and succeeding in registering hundreds of people. Unfortunately, she saw an opportunity for extra income by slipping in fake registration cards with her genuine ones. Eventually, she was making up hundreds of her own, and, due to both sloppiness on our part and some creativeness on hers, many fake ones passed us by.
The local registrar called us, notifying us that among the vast multitudes of cards we had submitted, several hundred were not real addresses or names. Of course, I cooperated with the authorities to figure out what had happened. It wasn't difficult to figure it out. Even without expertise we were able to identify the handwriting of all the fraudulent cards with ease. Once they were all together in a pile, it was obvious. We cooperated with the District Attorney, and confronted the woman who had submitted the cards.
Prior to any official action having been taken, the media learned of the incident. And a local channel ran a ridiculous and sensational story about possible "massive" fraud, and how ACORN might be trying to rig elections. They ran with the story for one night, making it sound sinister and widespread. No one from the station contacted me or anyone else affiliated with the registration drive to find out anything further, and they never followed up.
Had they done so, they would have discovered that a single mother of five, who had been out of work for many years, but who had excelled at registering many actual voters, was tempted by an opportunity to make a little more money to put a little more food on the table. She confessed, worked with us, and the D.A. worked out a fair plea bargain.
That's all it was. ACORN was nothing but cooperative with the authorities, and the problem was easily solved. There was nothing sinister; just something kinda sad.
Because of other corruption I saw at ACORN within that local branch, I have never worked with them again. But voter fraud? I certainly never saw any voter fraud on ACORN's part, and when registration fraud surfaced, ACORN helped stop it. Not that the media was interested.
"Palin's" fundraising letter:
"... We've always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn't know how far their allies would go. The Obama-supported, far-left group, ACORN, has been accused of voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states."
Sounds like they hired Bill O'Reilly to write their fundraisers. It's got the "far-left" moniker (B.O. trademark), and even the vast conspiracy angle.
The only thing missing is Bill O'Reilly's UN helicopters, secular humanists, Media Matters, and George Soros pulling the strings in league with the French government.
Signature checking is a very costly operation. Depending upon the number of signatures received fact checking could result in hiring from as few as four to a dozen or more. Each signature checker must have a computer to signatures against a master voter file. Since voter files are proprietary neither the democratic or republican parties are going to simply hand over their files. It would either cost a handsome amount of money to purchase one or voter files may not be made available at any cost depending upon the state parties' possessiveness of their files.
It may require as little as a week to verify all signatures or it could take a month. Very few grassroots organizations can afford the extra staff. Even states that have much greater resources only check a small percentage of the signatures. If there are too many errors from the sampling further sampling is done in progressive stages to determine the extent of bad signatures rather than commit the office space, equipment, and staff to check all the signatures received.
The above has been known for years. The only injured party is the company that paid the signature gatherers for unusable signatures. Bad signatures are an added cost to doing this type of business. As the article stated bad registrations do not turn into votes unless poll workers accept someone who shows up in a teletubbie outfit while claiming to be from somewhere out there. Harry Potter is not going to have an opportunity to vote.
The entire ACORN thing is faux news intended to help the Republican Party. Watching the media jump on this junk news is proof of their craven betrayal of the American people due to their willingness to blatantly mislead them for days on end. The only people buying into the ACORN nonsense are people who "want" to believe that it is true and bad.
This is another failure of the democrats. Way back in 2000 and 2004, there was outrageous vote fraud. When it was real they said nothing, they just let it go, left Bushites destroy the country and economy.
Now here it is, Democrats hire people on the street to register voters, not they will vote anyway, their employees getting greedy and over doing the registrations so they can get paid more. Now they are accused of voter fraud, what a joke. Just left them have another turn around, The election was stolen twice they do nothing, the constitution laws were broken 1000's of times over the past 8 years, they do nothing. International laws broken, do nothing. The do nothing democrats better start standing up like Kucinich does, grow a set of balls, impeach, filibuster, run the law like the republicans, DEMOidiots fail.
All hail McCain and the Canadian women, woot!
In the early 1970s Gore Vidal appeared on the Dick Cavett Show. He told the audience that there was only one political party in America, the Party of Money.
Money has corrupted the political process, politicians, and the rule of law. The cost of advertising on television, direct mail, and other avenues to reach the people. The Republican and Democratic Parties will spend one billion dollars. That is an obscene amount of money to spend on self and group promotion.
Modern public servants have been bought by corporate America to tend to its legal needs. I hear the same words everywhere I go, "It doesn't matter which of the candidates become president they will serve the corporate agenda." Corporate America normally supports republicans because they lay down much easier than the recalcitrant democrats who cling to the antiquated idea of a democratic republic, but they are coming along only a little slower.
One can know that fascism is coming, because of the number of lawyers who support it.
Lets assume Acorn is as evil as they say. The difference then is democrats want to register as many voters as they can, and in their zeal some bad voters get registered but don't actually get to vote (registering fraudulently does not equate to actually getting to vote). Contrast this with republicans who's efforts to suppress fraudulent voters actually ends up depriving tens of thousands of valid voters of the right to vote. So lets go ahead and have this argument.
So lets compare. Acorn falsely registers people to vote who in the end can't actually vote. Thats on one side. On the other side you have the state of Florida depriving thousands of valid registered voters of the right to vote by 'mistakenly' labeling them as convicted felons.
So lets compare. Acorn falsely registers people to vote who in the end can't actually vote. That is on one side. On the other side you have the state of Michigan attempting to deprive thousands of valid registered voters of the right to vote because they've had the misfortune of having their homes foreclosed upon, even though the law allows a grace period to remain on the voting rolls for just such an contingency.
To sum up:
Acorn falsely registers, no actual false votes.
Republican operatives successfully deprive tens of thousands of citizens of the right to vote.
So yes, lets discuss Acorn.
I hope McCain brings up Acorn and I hope Obama destroys him on it.
Wish I'd said it that succinctly.
This is classic Rovian brinksmanship. Always accuse the opposition of what your own party is (or has always been) doing. Put the cards on the table first and you control the message. Any retaliation will seem like oneupsmanship or sour grapes.
All this ACORN nonsense is about tilling the fields in order to have a plausible scapegoat in case of defeat, while simultaneously marginalizing the republican's own, and far more extensive, voter supression, disenfranchisement, and privatization (Diebold machines) when their victory comes. Make the Dems own the term "voter fraud" and anything the Repugs do will seem disingenuous when the Dems cry foul.
This is all new and shiny - my fucking sainted ass.
Go to CSPAN and search for Bradley Schlozman in front of the Judiciary Committee chaired by Patrick Lehey.
PAY ESPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE TESTIMONY WITH REGARD TO THE RED BOOK!!
The RED BOOK has been supplanted by the BLUE BOOK which takes all the restrictions mentioned in the Judiciary Committee with regard to the RED BOOK out of the now valid BLUE BOOK.
This issue was raised in the Judiciary Committee with Gonzales when he was still Attorney General.
So don't be fucking stupid folks - this was a planned assault on ACORN by the GOP, and the official testimony in front of the Judiciary Committee proves it.
The lapdog US Attorneys will go after ACORN in accordance with the new BLUE BOOK.
The only way the Repubs can win is to cheat or prevent people from voting. The entire United States should adopt Minnesota's voting laws. People can register before or on election day at the polls. ID needed at the polls includes driver's licenses, utility bills or just a neighbor who can vouch that you live where you say you do. After the election, the registrations are checked and errors corrected. Once in a while someone votes twice thinking they can vote in every precinct where they own property, for example. Minnesota has the highest voting rates in the country and very little voting fraud. This year, 90% of eligible voters have already registered with about 5,000 more registering each week. Should be an interesting election.
Here is what i don't understand- Repugs are slamming Obama, calling him a terrorist for being 'involved' with Acorn.
But McCain was clearing involved with Acorn- why the double stardard?
he's not held to a duty to be consistent.
While he and Palin are shouting "who is Hussein Obama?", he has held both sides of almost all issues. He reserves the right to change his mind and he has consistently been a former prisoner-of-war which is the core of his image.
In 2000, there were thousands of voter registrations that failed in a Florida county because they were incomplete or had incorrect information. The registrar of voters gave the Republican Party access to the Republican registrations and let them take them into a room, along with the RP files, where they corrected them and returned to the office for acceptance. It was illegal to give access to any registrations to those who were not employees of the department.
The Democratic registrations were left in the rejected bin. No one was notified of the problems with their registrations.
In 2004, a group hired by the Republican Party to obtain registrations by setting up registration tables in malls in many states. Republican registrations were sent in. The Democratic registrations were dumped into the garbage.
This was reported and I have waited to hear if any legal actions were taken.
Nothing has been done about the Assistant Attorneys General scandal where AAG's were fired because would not accept that they had to prosecute non-Republican groups who gather signatures for any fault, real or not, that arose. Those AAG's have been replaced by those who will toe the Republican line. The Republicans are already starting to clamor that if Obama wins, it will be an invalid Presidency because the Dems cheated.
Does anyone with a brain not believe that this is classic Rove: "Blame others for doing what you do and no one will look into your actions" and "there will always be questions about an Obama presidency?"
I am not surprised that the right wing fascist network Fox News was represented in 90% of the video. If they were fair and balanced then they would look at the Republicans drive to stop people from voting.
If you catch some one trying to steal your car do you let them go? If some one harms your child ,do you let them go? Of course not. I am old and won't have to live here on earth much longer,( thank the great and powerfull magical being in the sky). Come back to live another life? You would have to drag me, bitting and kicking all the way back, no thanks. The human race has a cancer problem, and that cancer is the percent of people who want MORE. People hungry next door? fuck you I want MORE! Sick? need medical help? fuck you I want MORE Losing your home? fuck you I want MORE! Any crime, any lie any transgression is a-ok as long as it ends in you getting MORE * do you know what you want Rocco? http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=bogart%... yea I want more,Bogart,key largo. Perhaps the rich ruling class are right, the common people are to fucking stupid to rule themselves, how long have we been trying to get them to understand? to wake up to what is going on? We are in the biggest shit hole in the world now but at least those " faggots" can't get married. Magical being people, want to see what the devil looks like? Want to see real evil in the world? just look for MORE. WE are the country our parents warned us about! Me, me, me, more, more, more.-CEO
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