I wish I could say definitively that the bust of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) -- which comes just as McCain's campaign starts grumbling about Obama's campaign donors, and renews efforts to malign our candidate's background as a community organizer -- was a nefarious plot. It sure looks like it to me, but it's way too soon to know.
But, from here, the major media's reportage seems pretty one-sided,
Little of the coverage has been devoted to the statement issued by Bertha Lewis, who currently serves as the interim Chief Organizer of ACORN:
"Over the past year, ACORN has worked hard to help over 80,000 people in Clark County register to vote. As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have reviewed all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations.
For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application into election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual.
Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 "problem application packages," which involved 33 former canvassers.
On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.
Today's raid by the Secretary of State's Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls."
Long before this raid occurred, Rethuglicans have been priming the pump on this issue through Fox News:
If election officials ignored ACORN's own alerts to fraudulent registrations, only to hit their offices with scandal at the eleventh hour, this could well be a means to disenfranchise thousands of voters while smearing Obama's "community organizer" background.
It's all too perfect.
While they may successfully disenfranchise some voters, it's too "on the nose" for American voters to ignore the dirty politics at the root. McCain may wind up with nothing from this but dirty hands.