Clearly the Republicans have decided that they're going to try to turn ACORN into a Willie Horton-type symbol for this campaign.
Not content to simply launch a coordinated campaign of voter suppression across the country, the Republicans have decided that they are going to use ACORN to accent their politics of racial fear.
By raising the spectre of a grassroots anti-poverty group with roots in minority communities (ACORN) somehow flooding the voter rolls with thousands of fake voter registrations (especially from communities of colour), the Republicans are attempting to spread fear that minority groups are trying to steal the election for Obama. This is nothing more than another one of their "guilt by association" tactics against the "community organiser" Obama.
As is becoming increasingly clear from the ugliness voiced by the crowds at Republican rallies, the McCain/Palin/RNC campaign have decided that the only way they can win is by feeding the basest instincts of voters who are frightened and angry. Turning that fear and anger onto Obama specifically and African-Americans in general is the basis of their campaign.
It is easy to look at ACORN and the problems with their voter registration drives and turn them into a target. But the situation is much more complicated than the narrative being cooked up by the right wing fear mongers and the folks in the media who are playing into their game. (While we all expect Fox to run with such a line of attack, much of the rest of the media is picking up the Republican spin on this as well -- CNN this afternoon ran a remarkably one-sided account of ACORN voter forms in Lake County, Indiana.)
From my point of view and experience, the biggest problem with ACORN's voter registration efforts is that they often pay (or offer bonuses) to their outreach workers based on the number of forms they turn in, or they measure job performance through a quota of registrations per day. In doing so, they create a financial incentive for workers to turn in fake registration forms. It appears that most of the fraudulent registrations being talked about are related to such "creative" registration by the peer outreach workers ACORN hires.
Clearly these incidents show there is a need for better training and supervision of the ACORN workers. They should also change their payment policy to the much more ethical way practice of paying a livable hourly wage. Such a change would remove much of the incentive for fraud. It would also reflect the challenges of conducting voter registration campaigns in communities where it can be hard to find new registrants - in some neighbourhoods, all of the time knocking on doors and working street corners often finds few unregistered eligible voters willing to register because of barriers such as non-citizenship, felony restrictions, cynicism, fear of showing up on government lists, or other barriers.
(These problems are not unique to ACORN voter registration drives. Similar fake names and duplications are often found in other voter registration efforts, or petitions to place candidates or referendum questions on the ballot, but they don't get the kind of attention that the ACORN problems are receiving.)
But it is a far leap from criticizing these practices to presenting it as a coordinated campaign of intentional fraud.
ACORN has little choice but to turn in these voter registration forms. In many cases they simply don't realise that any individual application is flawed, not recognizing the bogus name, not seeing that the street address on the application is fake, or not knowing that the voter may have accidently filled out more than one form or already been registered.
In many states, it would be illegal for an organisation to fail to turn in a voter registration form they had received. This is to prevent a group from registering voters and then throwing out those from one party or other factors. It is up to the voter registration officials to sort out the fraudulent applications, not those collecting the forms. (Yes, that means even if a voter fills out a form with "Donald Duck" as the name, or 199 people are registered at the same 1 bedroom apartment, the organization is still required to turn it in.)
Voter registration is hard work, especially when you're working with the most marginalised folks in our society. Unfortunately we live in a political system that puts up barriers to voter registration and participation, making efforts like ACORN's necessary. (In many other democracies, the government takes the initiative to find and register all eligible voters instead of requiring people to jump through bureaucratic hoops to add their names to the rolls.)
An excellent account of the way in which the Nevada ACORN office responsibly handled this issue is found is mcjoan's diary yesterday "ACORN's Nevada Office Raided".
ACORN Statement from Bertha Lewis, Interim Chief Organizer, on Incident in Las Vegas:
"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 review 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." [emphasis mine]
Similarly, the Detroit Free Press reported that when duplicate and problem registrations were found among ACORN's registrations, the organisation worked with local election officials to correct the problems.
In Oak Park, clerk Sandra Gadd said they have been seeing "lots of duplication" from ACORN in recent months but were reassured by ACORN officials that the group was working to correct the problem.
"They've been very cooperative," Gadd said. "I spoke with them this week. They called me, and they're willing to go door-to-door to do whatever they have to do to take care of this."
So while this makes clear that ACORN was responsibly working to cooperate with election officials to weed out fraudulent registrations, it was still targeted in a politically opportunistic way. It is perhaps then no surprise that we learn that a member of Nevada Republican Senator John Ensign's staff is alleged to have been pressing for an investigation into ACORN's voter registrations in Las Vegas, at the very same time Ensign and the right-wing blogs and talk radio thugs were making up and attacking imaginary funding in the bailout bill for ACORN. (The alleged ACORN money was never included in any version of the bill. And even if it had been, it would have been totally appropriate to support the legally separate ACORN Housing Corporation which does incredible work on home ownership and foreclosure issues).
If you look at ACORN's protocol for verifying voter registrations you see a very thorough process with more safeguards than I've seen in most voter registration programmes I've ever been part of. (Of course that doesn't mean the protocol was consistently followed in all localities.)
Finally, remember that it is highly unlikely that even those registrations that may somehow make it through the registration process are going to result in vote fraud - if they are the result of outreach workers attempting to inflate their registration numbers, these imaginary voters are not going to be showing up on election day.
I'm not arguing that we need to be sucked into defending every single thing that ACORN is doing -- but we do need to stand up for them against the vicious campaign being conducted against them.
Whether you buy ACORN's version of events or not, it is unmistakable that the right wing noise machine has decided to turn ACORN and their voter registration drive into a symbol to scare "middle America." By painting them as a radical group engaged in voter fraud, the right is intentionally playing up a stereotype that is being used by extension to smear Barack Obama. The stereotype of the black radical gaming the system, the stereotype of the Chicago politician engaging in voter fraud, the stereotype of anti-poverty organisations getting government money to conduct radical organizing... And they further these stereotypes by circulating false rumours that Barack Obama's community organizing work was somehow part of ACORN (it wasn't).
In this context, Palin's and Giuliani's seemingly random attacks on "community organisers" become transparent as part of the larger effort -- community organiser, ACORN, Ayers, Wright, domestic terrorist, radical, "doesn't see things like we do," Muslim, Michelle on tape using "whitey", "exotic," etc ...their version of connect the dots is designed to create a frightening image of Barack Obama, an image at odds with what voters see when they see Obama in debates or interviews.
Allowing the Republicans to attack ACORN and masquerade as the protectors of clean elections would be the height of Orwellian doublespeak -- the Republicans are the folks who are encouraging massive voter roll purges, vote caging, illegally lying to college students trying to register, absentee ballot scams, voter intimidation, absurd ID requirements, using foreclosure lists to challenge residency, delaying new citizen applications too late for registration, changing polling places without notice to voters, refusing to restore ex-felons' voting rights in a timely manner, suing to stop same day registration/voting, attacking voter registration groups, inaccurate and incomplete voter lists, confusing mailings to voters...the list goes on and on and on. It is the classic Republican approach to election issues -- scream about non-existent "voter fraud" as an excuse to throw up barriers to voting by minorities and poor people.
Let's be clear where the real election fraud is this year... and it has nothing to do with ACORN and everything to do with the Republican Party.
The Republicans are down to the bottom of their deck..they can't win this election while the economy is falling apart, so they've sunk to this level.
Whatever their faults, ACORN is an authentic grassroots organization that works effectively to empower poor people in this country. We need to stand up for them against this kind of racially-charged demonization. The right should not be allowed to use them as the "Willie Horton" type symbol in this campaign.