Voter Registration

Sen. McCain complained: “This ACORN voter registration fraud.” ACORN is a national network of community groups and Republicans are claiming that they’re stealing the election and it’s Obama’s fault. 

There is a tremendous difference between voter “registration” fraud and “voter” fraud.  Voter fraud is punishable by one year in jail for a single vote and only a very foolish person would attempt such a stunt. This won’t have any impact on the election, because no one is allowed to vote unless they are properly registered. There is no evidence of fraudulent registration actually leading to organized voting fraud. However, using voter registration fraud to distract from vote suppression is nothing new, for the Republican party.

For over twenty-five years, Republicans have promoted the myth of voting registration fraud to argue for restrictive voting law, but Bush’s Justice Department found virtually no organized voting fraud.  The only fraud committed has been against ACORN itself. Acorn hired 13,000 workers, who registered 1.3 million new voters, however a few of those workers turned in registration forms with inaccurate and even made-up names to get credit for work they didn’t do.  ACORN fired them and reported the fraudulent registration forms.  

ACORN is required by law to submit all forms collected whether they appear to be bogus or not, that way election officials, not partisan groups, can make the call.  ACORN flags cards that may not be legitimate.  And in many places, the charges of fraud only came up because ACORN was the one who flagged the cards.

Recently, Obama said that his relationship to ACORN began 13 years ago when he represented ACORN in partnership with the Justice Department in having Illinois implement what was called the Motor Voter Law to make sure people could go to Department of Motor Vehicles to get registered, since the law wasn’t being implemented In Illinois.