Let’s talk a little bit about voter fraud this morning, and in particular the GOP-meme of voter fraud committed by ACORN.
I bring this up, because in yesterday’s paper, a 100 year-old woman voted for the first time ever. I point to this, not because this black woman always felt her vote wouldn’t count, but I point to this article because of the accusation of liberals out to steal the election and voter fraud by the wingnuts in this area. Here are a couple of the responses to the article:
Posted by robertbfw on October 14, 2008 at 2:29 p.m.
Good gravy! The liberals are pulling out all the stops!
[...]Posted by Friendly on October 14, 2008 at 3:33 p.m.
in response to knox_me_up
I agree. The Obamaniacs probably told her the “mean old republicans” would take her social security check away. And, if she is 100 what does she care how bad Chairman Obama will mess up the country.
[...]Posted by ASummers on October 14, 2008 at 3:40 p.m.
Yes, if Acorn was in Nashville they probably got 100 illegal aliens to register 10 times each. Thats one way to stack the vote for Ohnobama!
Wait a minute. Her name is Dilla Burt, a little too close to Dilbert huh?
The disconnect can sometimes be amazing.The allegations against ACORN are truly nutty (bad pun intended), and yet, even when explained in simple language, the righties wrap themselves up in their delusions and discount anything that does not fit into their ideal. But, for those of you truly interested in the every-two-year-cycle of Acorn voter fraud, Josh Marshall explains this very well, and I do suggest you hop over and read his post in it’s entirety, but here is a teaser:
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 they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won’t count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there’s very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.
The real story of voter fraud comes from the GOP. Voter rolls are being purged, once again.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Ohio’s secretary of state to establish a system to verify hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters by Friday.
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner also has to make the eligibility information available to all 88 county election boards and use government records to check for voter registration fraud.
Nine of the 16 members of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with an opinion that upheld a lower court’s ruling in the lawsuit filed by the Ohio Republican Party against Brunner.
This is a huge victory for the GOP in Ohio, and stems from a long-running battle by the Ohio GOP to disenfranchise democratic votes.
Voter fraud is not limited to Ohio. Michigan was embroiled in a voter roll purge earlier this year, that was found to have illegally removed names.
A recent report from PIRG found that 19 states were illegally purging voter rolls.
Shorter version, people will show up to vote only to be turned away.
Of course, purging voter rolls isn’t the only obstruction. We still have the on-going phone jamming scheme that came from the GOP.
So I ask, how the hell can the righties hold their head up when making baseless claims against Acorn, when it is their own party that is comitting the most heinous of crimes, and illegally taking away the vote from hundres of thousands of people?
