Stories of ACORN in the media and McCain making accusations of voter fraud have made me feel a little dizzy in the past few days. Horrible memories of fraud, voter suppression and purging of voters in Florida in 2000 came flooding back. Surely we won’t have to deal with a similar mess this year?
I decided to do a little reading about ACORN. The organization is The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. ACORN was founded in 1970. Here is the mission statement published on their site: “The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) aims to organize a majority constituency of low- to moderate-income people across the United States. The members of ACORN take on issues of relevance to their communities, whether those issues are discrimination, affordable housing, a quality education, or better public services. ACORN believes that low- to moderate-income people are the best advocates for their communities, and so ACORN’s low- to moderate-income members act as leaders, spokespeople, and decision-makers within the organization.”
ACORN has played an active role in voter registration in some states. They have signed up new voters in communities that are considered low income and worked to promote voter turn out. According to ACORN, they are not partisan and register voters for both parties.
Here is what McCain is saying: McCain is trying to tie this organization to Obama. He points out that Obama paid $800,000 to ACORN during the primary campaigns to register voters. He is calling for an investigation into what he calls voter fraud. One of the loudest voices in the outcry is Ken Blackwell. He was the Bush Campaign chair and Ohio Secretary of State who has been accused of voter suppression in 2004.
Here is what Obama is saying: There are no political ties between Obama and ACORN. He did help represent the organization in a lawsuit in Illinois. The money in question was not paid directly to ACORN, but to another organization handling voter registration for the Obama campaign. This organization used ACORN as a subcontractor to increase voter registration.
Here is what ACORN is saying: On the organization’s website, there is a statement for people to learn the truth about ACORN. According to ACORN, they are required in every state where they register voters to turn in all applications, even some that are thought to be problematic. Applications thought to be questionable are flagged when they are turned over to the individual counties to be processed.
The statement points out that fraud in the form of false registrations would likely never work anyway. Measures used to check flagged applications and the need for identification at the polls would prevent the mass scale fraudulent voting that would have to happen on election day to steal an election in this way.
ACORN accuses the McCain campaign of “losing his love” for the organization. According to ACORN, McCain was supportive of the organization and was even a keynote speaker at an immigration rally in 2006 that was sponsored by ACORN. McCain denies these accusations and says he was there, but he wasn’t with ACORN.
To make matters even more confusing, pundits on television are accusing ACORN of paying drug addicts to get signatures on the voter registration applications and are paying per signature. If this were the case, there would undoubtedly be little risk of actual fraud on election day. However, ACORN denies these claims and insists they pay workers by the hour and not by the signature.
It looks like the officials in the cities and states affected by ACORN are catching large numbers of fraudulent registrations and this is a good thing. The only thing that worries me is that actual voters who did register with ACORN will be caught up in this mess and turned away from the polls on election day. Then we will have a repeat of Florida in 2000 on a much larger scale.