I know these issues have been discussed ad nauseum here for weeks, but my goal here is simply to put the argument in a viral email-friendly format. I hope you find it useful, and you have my full permission to copy/paste without attribution.
For the DIY election thief:
Step 1: Turn in many thousands of voter registration forms with invalid names/addresses.
Step 2: Somehow get the Registrar of Voters in every county to not notice all of the invalid registration forms, and process the applications.
Step 3: Recruit lots of people who are willing to face felony charges and years in prison to fraudulently vote under these fake names and residences.
Step 4: Make sure to have those people posted at the invalid mailing addresses to receive the voter registration cards the county mails out.
Step 5: Create thousands of fake IDs with names and addresses matching your fake voter registration forms so the people you've recruited to perpetrate your grand conspiracy can actually show up at the polls and vote.
Step 6: On election day, send out your gang of election thieves to vote using their fraudulent IDs, and win the election for the good team!
See!? Wasn't that easy! You've just committed voter fraud on a mass scale and helped to "destroy the fabric of democracy," and it hardly took any effort!
My friends, the ACORN story is pure and utter horseshit. Can you guess how many of the steps above ACORN was able to accomplish? That's right: only Step 1. And they didn't even do a very good job of it, because ACORN itself alerted local elections departments that many of the forms they were turning in were fraudulent!
Why would ACORN do such a self-defeating thing in blatant violation of Step 2? It's simple: they had to!
Even if an honest worker or organization receives a voter registration form that is probably fraudulent (the person who filled it out wrote "Mickey Mouse"), the organization has to turn in the application, because staffers and the organizations they work for can't be perceived as turning in some registration forms and not others. That would undoubtedly be a bigger problem than making the Registrar of Voters discard the invalid registrations himself (which is what happens all the time, in every state, everyday). Somewhere, there is probably another Tony Romo, and if any organization threw away his registration because they thought it was fraudulent, this other non-Cowboys-quarterback Tony Romo would have good reason to file a lawsuit.
The other issue is dishonest ACORN staffers who decided to get paid to copy names out of a phone book instead of actually going out and registering real voters. These people will be prosecuted, and rightfully so. Still, they only accomplished Step 1 in the "commit mass voter fraud" process, and there is absolutely no evidence that they wanted to do anything other than get paid for being lazy.
But the main point here is that invalid registrations (registration fraud), even if they're actually processed and the nonexistent voter shows up on the voter rolls, almost never become actual votes (that's voter fraud, Mr. and Mrs. McPalin). As the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law said last week, "It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than he will impersonate another voter at the polls."
ACORN is threatening to "destroy the fabric of democracy"? Give me a break.
Please make sure your friends and family know this.