While we are celebrating the election of a President who can finally turn the country in the right direction, don't forget those of us on the ground who have been fighting for the rights of poor and working-class people consistently and constantly for the past 30 years.
I've been an ACORN member here in Cleveland for almost 4 years now. I have always been moderately active in the community, volunteering for various political campaigns, being part of block clubs, volunteering at local community centers, etc. I have always wanted to serve and do a little part to help the world be better.
Every election cycle, ACORN has been the victim of partisan attacks for our voter registration drives, but this year was particularly vicious. We register EVERYone, whether they register Republican, Democrat, or Independent. We hire from the neighborhood, and pay what we can afford. The reason for these attacks is because the people we register tend to be young, minority, poor and working-class. We not only register them, we contact them 3 times before the election for GOTV, and will drive people to the polls if needed.
As we all know, when more people vote, especially people from our neighborhoods, they tend to vote for the candidate that they feel best represents THEM, and, unfortunately for the Republicans, in most cases, that candidate is not a Republican.
Do we have some workers who don't do their jobs properly? Yes, as with most employers. Do we deliberately try to push through bad registrations? No; however, we are required by law in most places to hand in every registration with information on it, even if someone started to fill it out and then said, "Oops, I messed up; let me start a different one". Of course, we flag these types of registrations in a separate pile before giving them to the Boards of Elections, but Faux News and others did not state THIS part of the problem, because it didn't play into their description of us as "subversive", etc.
Here in Cleveland, when we would turn in the three piles: verified, unverified, and problematic (meaning 'we know these are not good registrations; however, we HAVE to give them to you'), the elections worker, in almost every single instance, would hand back those cover sheets, stating that they didn't know what to do with them. The registrations WE had flagged as bad were then mixed with the others and processed exactly the same.
The young 19-year-old that registered 70 times? He registered 18 times with ACORN (once we caught it, our staff called him and TOLD him that he didn't need to register anymore; he was also put on our "Do Not Register" list). The rest of his registrations were through the Public Library, the NAACP, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, etc. You would never have known this by listening to the news, however.
In Cuyahoga County, we registered or updated registrations for at least 65,000 people. When one of the Republican members of the Board of Elections asked elections workers to pull 'bad' ACORN registrations, they were able to find 150 registrations - about 1/2 of the registrations were ACORN registrations - the rest were from other organizations, but the same people who submitted multiple registrations through ACORN.
Although we do not have a firm "quota", there is a performance standard set. Many canvassers are working solo without direct supervision for most of the day, so there has to be a way to measure their work, and it is a reasonable and do-able (sp?) number.
Although I am not paid staff, as a member, in 2006, there was a minimum wage initiative on the ballot here in Ohio that we were gathering signatures for. At the time, I worked downtown and had 1 hour for lunch. I used to take 1/2 of that time to go out and get signatures. I also had voter registration forms with me. If I ran into someone who wasn't registered, I would ask them if they'd like to register. When I would ask the petition signer if the address listed on the petition was the same as the address they were registered to vote at and they said, "No", I would ask if they'd like to update their registration. I averaged 2 new or updated voter registrations per 1/2 hour, and voter registrations weren't even my primary goal.
Voter registration is just a small part of what ACORN does. We lobby our state and national legislators for bills that will help our community - minimum/living wage, laws against predatory lending (including predatory mortgages), paid sick days, etc. We are part of the network of VITA sites that provide free tax preparation for our communities. We work on local issues - anything that will help the people living in our communities.
Our 'actions' are taken on only as a last resort. For example, a young college student came to our Cleveland office with the following problem:
His father had passed away, leaving him his mortgage-free home; however, the majority of his estate was tied up in probate court for over a year. Once the estate had cleared probate, the young man found out that there were back taxes due on the house (less than $2000). He also found out that the county had recently SOLD the house for the back taxes to an outside company that was going to re-sell the house for an enormous profit. He went to this company and received a written agreement from them that if he paid X amount of dollars (I don't remember the exact amount), then he could get the house back. He scraped and borrowed to get the funds. When he went back to the office less than two weeks later, he was told that he now owed MORE than the original stated amount. This happened three times before he came to us. We contacted the company, who refused to talk to us. So, a group of us went, with television cameras and the young man's mother (he was in school) and stayed in the office until someone agreed to talk to the mother and come to a reasonable agreement. This young man now lives in the house his father worked hard for.
This is the type of work we try to do, because one person sometimes CAN'T make the difference, but many voices can.
Because of the recent attacks against us, we are hurting. People who never heard of us before think we're that 'radical, subversive, voter fraud' group that they've read about in the papers and seen on television from crazy, uninformed people with a platform like Lou Dobbs and his ilk. Funders have 'held' their grants and others that we can normally count on are rescinding grants. Most of our money comes from our social/economic justice work - lead prevention/education, VITA work, etc. When people think that we only do partisan political work, it takes away from our real mission of giving voice to the communities we work so hard for.
We need people to speak up for us. If you have a dollar or two, you can donate to us on our website: ACORN . When you talk to your friends about us, let them know the type of work that we REALLY do. I hope that our organization comes out of these attacks stronger and better than ever, because the work we do really DOES matter, even if we have to do it one household or one community at a time. Poor and working-class people having a voice is a worthwhile cause, even though it's a horrible thought for the 'ruling class' here in our classless society.