ACORN poses "immediate concern" for McCain campaign

Co-chairs of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee John Danforth and Warren Rudman said that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) posed an immediate concern for those hoping to have a fair and uncontested election.

Danforth outlined the allegations facing ACORN, including evidence the organization registered the same person 73 times, sent in the names of the Dallas Cowboys, and tried to register a seven-year-old.

"We say our safeguards are working...but we don't know how many are slipping through the cracks."

The co-chairs were unable to say if they knew how many may have been wrongly disqualified or how many have been disqualified for human error.

Danforth and Rudman said the Committee is looking for a bipartisan solution and that they have sent a letter to Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee Chair asking for help in rooting out voting fraud by posting volunteers from each campaign in polling places in battleground states to help oversee the election. According to Danforth, this request has gone unanswered for over a month.

Comments

[Tony]

The McCain campaign has just launched a new campaign with two goals:

1. They want to “turn the page” from the subject of the economy. To do this, they are creating a Boogey Man out of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
2. At the same time they are trying to justify why they will not accept the results of the election if Barack Obama wins.

The Creation of a Boogey Man: ACORN

Here’s the story. According to a Washington Post article,

“On the way into the event [in Waukesha, WI], the Republican Party of Wisconsin handed out fliers reading ‘Your Vote Is Being Stolen,’ an anti-ACORN leaflet that concluded, ‘Why is vote fraud allowed? Vote fraud is allowed since it benefits Democrats.’”

In the next week you’re going to hear plenty about ACORN. You’re going to hear about raids on their headquarters and suspected voter fraud. For example, in Las Vegas, the police raided the ACORN headquarters and seized computers and papers. If you just read the headline, you feel sure the local ACORN office must have been up to no good. But read this press release from ACORN that tells their side of the story. According to the press release:

“Anytime ACORN quality control staff has identified a suspicious application, we have separated that application out and flagged it for election officials. We turn any suspicious applications to election officials separately, along with a cover sheet identifying the nature of the problem and an offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual. (Note that civic organizations are required by law to turn over ANY signed voter registration applications even when they are known to have problems). We immediately dismiss any employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations. “

Let’s be clear. ACORN has had some serious issues with overzealous workers who falsified voter registrations. This is tragic and alarming. But it does not mean that all of the millions of voters that were registered by ACORN are invalid.

A Campaign to Create Noise around ACORN

What is behind the sudden surge of stories on ACORN? Ask Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who said on Fox News:

“…these rumblings that you're hearing, it's quite interesting. Our office is being barraged by numerous, numerous, tens, dozens, hundreds of phone calls. In addition, people close to me who do not work in the secretary of state's office are getting calls from random callers about one issue after another concerning voter fraud, even at 2:00 in the morning.

“So there is a concentrated effort going on out there to try to build the noise that you're discussing. And it's unfortunate because if we can find a specific allegation, we'll deal with it directly. But again, this creating fear in the minds of law-abiding citizens that somehow their vote is not going to count or that it's going to be diluted is a huge disservice to the voters of Ohio and to the rest of the country.”

Obviously, Republican operatives are fanning the flames of this story. Watch for propaganda against ACORN to spring up on blogs, YouTube and other outlets, including the mainstream media.

But what’s the end game? Besides distracting us from the economy, what’s the point of all of this noise about ACORN?

The Nuclear Option: Reject the Election Results

According to a story by Tom Curry at MSNBC:

“The co-chairman of the McCain advisory team in charge of monitoring alleged voter fraud, former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, hinted this week at potential post-Nov. 4 litigation if Obama wins due to suspect voters who had been registered by ACORN. ‘The contest could go on for a very long time,’ he told reporters.”

So, the McCain campaign is trying to simultaneously distract you from the financial crisis, while preparing to contest the election if Barack Obama wins.

This is nothing more than a preemptive strike by the Republicans to reject the results of an election that they have already lost. If the McCain campaign is so concerned about your right to vote, why are they not talking about is the illegal purging of voter rolls? The Republicans are not interested in talking about voters who are being disenfranchised. They’re too busy setting up their cover story for rejecting the election.

Here’s What We can Do

First, don’t let them change the subject. Keep the conversation focused on what everyday Americans need: the kind of change in Washington that Barack Obama can bring.

Second, the best way to ensure we prevent a long contracted legal battle over the election is to win by a landslide. If we win every swing state by a significant margin, the Republicans will have a harder time crying foul.

Call your local Obama headquarters and volunteer.

Call someone and ask them to vote.

Canvas your neighborhood.

Vote. In many states you can vote today. Check http://www.voteforchange.com/ for details of where and when you can vote.

Most importantly, get out the vote. Take election day off as a vacation day and work for change.

Don’t let the Republicans turn the page on us. Don’t let them steal the election with allegations of voter fraud. Get out and work today.

[delworthio]

Accusing ACORN of voter fraud is not honest.

ACORN helps poor people, minorities, and young people to register to vote. They hire thousands to do this work (paid hourly, NOT per registration card), and as with any organization there will be some slackers who won't work and just turn in false registrations. They spend millions of dollars on a highly-praised and sophisticated quality control system to root out these problems.

Most states require them by law to turn in every registration card, so they separate the suspect registrations and flag them as suspicious. ACORN doesn't have to do that but they do.

Rove and Gonzalez resigned over the scandal in which US attorneys were fired who didn't prosecute ACORN despite lack of evidence. NO evidence has been found of any ACORN wrongdoing. Where one US attorney did prosecute, he acknowledged that ACORN was the victim, not the perp. The perp is the ACORN employee ripping off ACORN by getting paid for not doing the work properly. ACORN turns in workers caught falsifying registrations to law enforcement and helps prosecute them.

The justice department did a study and found that the concept of widespread voter fraud has no actual merit. What other independent studies have found is that the real threat to voters' rights is the effort to suppress votes using tactics like removing names from rolls by the thousands if their addresses don't match up exactly, blocking early voting, passing laws to require a picture ID, or any number of things targeted at poor and minority populations.

Among the freedoms we fight for is the right to vote and ACORN helps citizens do that. It is un-American to suppress votes so please don't support those who do.