ACORN — So What?

I’m having a debate with a friend of mine about how valid are the complaints about ACORN signing up fake names during voting registration drives.

I guess I’m not understanding where the whole scandal is, apart from voter registration fraud. Some people handed in fake registrations. Now, I understand that carries some heavy legal penalties, but as far as I know, there is a big difference between voter registration fraud and actual voter fraud.

If I’m not misunderstanding this, all ACORN is doing is handing in the registrations after volunteers turn them in. It is up to the local officials — County Clerks, boards of election, Registrar of Voters, etc. — to verify and validate that these people can vote in the election.

What they might be doing that’s unethical is enticing people to register (or re-register) by paying for people to register. If you’re not sure if you’re registered and someone asks you, “are you registered,” you might say, “I don’t know.” So they reply, “well, we’ll sign you up anyway.” Is that fraud? OK, so in this case, things might have gotten a little further than that. According to ACORN, they always get the occasional “Mickey Mouse” registration. But by and large, they just collect the registrations and hand them in to the local officials for verification and enrollment in the voter rolls.

Now, voter fraud is something entirely different. For real voter fraud to take place given what ACORN has done, you’d have to believe they’re taking part in the following conspiracy:

1. False voter registration form is filled out and handed in by ACORN
2. Local officials verify and validate this fake name as an eligible voter
3. Someone has to keep track of where these fake people were registered and possibly create false IDs for each of them in case of challenges
4. Person who would commit voter fraud has to show up at this local polling place not knowing whether or not this fake name was actually validated, but they’d also have to be willing to face certain arrest if something suspicious was found about the original registration and the name was flagged

Seriously? Is this all they’ve got? Forget about electronic voting machines, do you know what a coordinated effort this would take to influence an election? Or am I just being naive?

It seems to me the reason volunteers turned in fake names was because they were probably lazy and had quotas to meet. They didn’t want to track down real people who weren’t registered, so they made something up. So now they’re going to do a 180 and get some ambition to steal an election?

Really?

Come on, people. This is a giant Red Herring. More mud to be thrown to create some swift-boat style confusion around Obama’s candidacy. “Oh, I heard something about dead people voting.”

Um, no, you heard the right wing talking heads trying to set you up for the post-election radio and television bitch sessions about how Obama was not elected legitimately. That’s all there is to it.

People who submitted false registrations should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

ACORN is possibly guilty of trying to get as many people registered to vote as possible by methods other than simple requests. They shouldn’t be paying anyone to register because that will only encourage fraud and the appearance of fraud.

But let’s not forget the difference between voter registration fraud, and actual voter fraud.