10.16.08

Gone nuts about ACORN

Posted in Around The Nation, Election 2008, Elections, Media at 12:59 pm by wcnews

The recent allegations made against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) for voter fraud is one of those stories that gets my blood boiling.  The traditional media, for the most part, has done a horrible job of pointing out the facts regarding ACORN’s voter registration efforts to the public.  It’s key to be clear exactly what ind of fraud is taking place.  This story is not about voter fraud, it’s about voter registration fraud, and there’s a big difference between the two.  Via Politico, Two kinds of fraud:

The key distinction here is between voter fraud and voter registration fraud, one of which is truly dangerous, the other a petty crime.

The former would be, say, voting the cemeteries or stuffing the ballot boxes. This has happened occasionally in American history, though I can think of recent instances only in rare local races. Practically speaking, this can most easily be done by whoever is actually administering the election, which is why partisan observers carefully oversee the vote-counting process.

The latter is putting the names of fake voters on the rolls, something that happens primarily when organizations, like Acorn, pay contractors for new voter registrations. That can be a crime, and it messes up the voter files, but there’s virtually no evidence these imaginary people then vote in November. The current stories about Acorn don’t even allege a plan to affect the November vote.

In other words voter registration fraud has been perpetrated against ACORN, ACORN has not committed any fraud, much less voter fraud. Another key to understanding this story is to know how the voter registration process works. Excerpts below will be from this post, ACORN, Stuck Between a Law and a Hard Place, from the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity’s PaperTrail blog.

To understand why ACORN is getting so much flak, it’s important to understand how the group works. More than 13,000 individuals, employed by the organization, went out and collected voter registration forms, according to ACORN’s website. It’s likely that a few of these individuals falsified the forms now in question; in 2007, canvassers working for ACORN in Missouri and Washington state admitted falsifying voter registrations. But ACORN also says it hired anywhere from two to 20 employees per office to comb over the piles of forms for fraudulent submissions. Instead of discarding these forms (a policy that seems like it might save them legal troubles), the group flags them as problematic, fires the employee responsible, has a supervisor hand the forms in anyway, and encourages the state to prosecute the wayward ex-employee, according to the group.

They don’t discard them because in most states that is against the law. Even if ACORN is positive the voter registration is fraudulent the law requires them to turn it in.

[Bob Walsh, a public information officer for the Nevada secretary of state] also said that ACORN should definitely have turned in the forms, even if they were false and ACORN knew they were false. In a state like Nevada, the law for third-party registration groups is particularly complicated. These groups must sign up with the secretary of state, who keeps track of the unique identifier of each registration form distributed to them. The voter registration organization is required to return every form it takes, whether completed or blank. That’s why ACORN submits registrations that anyone could tell are probably a big fat joke.

[...]

While voter registration law does vary state by state, ACORN follows the same procedure across the country. All of the secretary of state’s offices PaperTrail contacted, however, said that third-party registration groups should turn in fraudulent-looking forms, but can flag them to alert election officials to their suspicions.

Issues like this can sound confusing, but when put forth in a clear and concise manner as PaperTrail has done it’s very easy to understand. No voter fraud has been perpetrated on any state. ACORN has had fraud perpetrated on it by some of it’s employees. In most states they are required by law to hand in even voter registration cards they believe are fraudulent. Before handing them over to state officials ACORN combs through all the new registrations and flags those that are likely fraudulent.

This makes clear that anyone – politician, writer, pundit, blogger, etc.. – that is saying ACORN has committed or is committing voter fraud is ignorant of the facts.  (Click here to see who funds ACORN).

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