As the Republican Party’s efforts to stave off an electoral debacle, in November, grow ever more desperate, suddenly Lake County, Indiana, election offices have begun receiving huge numbers of blatantly fraudulent registration applications. In an intro to a television new segment on the subject, CNN (a.k.a. Fox Lite) detects "huge fears of voter fraud" throughout the country:
There are huge fears of voter fraud in the presidential election. We're 26 days from the election, one of the biggest horse races in American history. And already there is threat of big trouble. All eyes are on a handful of swing states where several voter fraud investigations are threatening a basic idea, whether or not free and fair elections will be held.
These fears, inasmuch as they actually exist, are almost entirely the product of the grossly exaggerated claims of the Republican Party, its legal teams and its media shock troops. It is a fear they wish to use to get out the vote of their own disenchanted voting base and to intimidate election officials and newly registered voters. Still more, this strategy suggests that the Republicans have already begun pre-positioning to be ready to contest another election in the courts.
A video of the CNN news segment has been posted on YouTube under the title "CNN Exposes How ACORN Steals Votes For Democrats". The video is linked to from the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch site at the end of a "news article" bylined "WASHINGTON, Oct 10, 2008 PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX":
A disclaimer appears at the bottom of the "article" explaining that it is actually "Paid for by the Republican National Committee. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee." The quality of the video is poor but decipherable.
Actually, the word "blatant" hardly describes the registration forms in question in Lake County, Indiana. According to the CNN report, one county in the state of Indiana has received at least 5000 forms so obviously fraudulent that they could not be better designed for display in a brief television spot. A few seconds are all that anyone needs in order to understand the gross nature of the improprieties involved. Not even the least attempt is made to cloak the fraud. It’s as if the perpetrators wanted their work to be detected.
While CNN identified the forms as having been delivered by ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the number one group for registering the poor in this country (hence a source of enormous frustration to the Republican Party), it apparently felt that its viewers didn’t need to know anything about the investigation that they undertook to verify the source of the forms. A Fox News report on the Lake County matter did show an election official saying on tape that the forms were delivered by ACORN but no actual verification seems to have been attempted by that network either. The word "alleged" seems to have disappeared altogether from the vocabulary of the two networks if these reports may be taken as representative.
Just to make sure that ACORN, and its registration drives, were smeared the maximum possible extent, CNN's reporter went to the address listed on the ACORN site for its Gary, Indiana, office only to find it "abandoned". There was no attempt made to determine under what circumstances. No attempt was made to avoid the blatant implication that ACORN is a fly-by-night organization that claims to have offices which don’t actually exist.
Undoubtedly, ACORN, and all such cash-strapped organizations for registering the poor, will have to add to their To Do List the immediate updating of their web sites as they quite appropriately begin to close down their field operations during the days before an election. This in order to avoid the inference in news stories that they "abandoned" their offices when their nefarious actions were discovered.
There has indeed been a recent public outcry about rampant voter fraud in the upcoming election. It has been composed of a Republican law suit against the Secretary of State, of Ohio, a raid on the Las Vegas headquarters of ACORN ordered by a (unfortunately Democratic) Secretary of State, for submitting less than 50 irregular registration forms, and orchestrated calling-campaigns to swing-state election offices in order to manufacture "voter fear and outrage" that the Republican media can exploit in "news stories," and, in the aftermath of the election, for Republican legal teams to utilize as the basis of challenges to election results in those vital states.
According to the AP story on the Las Vegas raid, even Secretary of State Ross Miller’s office admits that the total number of irregular registration forms was tiny and that the forms were pointed out to his office by officials of ACORN:
His spokesman, Bob Walsh, said investigators were using information from various sources, including the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Nevada.
"You don't have to read too many cop novels to know that sometimes people will tell you a grain of truth to try to hide the rest of the truth," Walsh said. "I'm certainly not suggesting that ACORN is that nefarious, but at the same time just because they handed over 50 to you doesn't mean there aren't 150 others out there."
The same story reports that the problem with most of the 50 forms was that the person who filled out the form was already registered: neither fraud nor a lawful basis for raiding the offices of a group involved in registering voters.