The past week or so the Republican National Committee and other state Republican parties have been complaining about possible voting fraud by the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). They have also tried to link Democrats and Obama to ACORN as if to say they are perpetrating voting fraud.
The GOP believe that since ACORN pays people to collect registrations and some of these have been faked, that actual votes are or will be cast illegally. They seem to forget that states check each and every new registration against state and federal records.
As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo writes:
The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout.
This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won’t count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there’s very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.
Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.
There is a significant effort in Ohio, by the GOP, to suppress the vote. They filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State claiming that registrations weren’t being checked. The suit came 2 days after the state got a nasty letter from the Social Security Administration complaining that Ohio was making too many checks of social security numbers. The SOS was ordered to provide a list of new registrations to county boards of elections – which already have access to them through the State Board of Elections computer system. The Secretary of State plans to appeal the ruling.
Ohio Republican Deputy Chairman Kevin DeWine said the ruling spoke volumes about Brunner, a Democrat.
“Her refusal to comply with federal law raises serious concerns about her ability to objectively oversee this election. It’s especially troubling in light of her connection to ACORN and that group’s stunning confession this week of fraudulent registration activity happening right here in Ohio,” DeWine said.
An ACORN representative is on a Brunner advisory committee, while Republicans say Obama has “strong ties” to ACORN, serving in the past as an attorney and “leadership trainer” for the group.
Within three hours of the ruling, DeWine sent out a GOP fundraising appeal, saying, “Please contribute today and help us fight the legal effort by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and her Democrat allies to let voter fraud go unchecked.”
The reason the GOP wanted the lists released was so they can use them for frivolous challenges to suppress votes that would affect Democratic votes. The GOP also had people writing down licence plate numbers during early voting at Columbus’ Vets Memorial.
They want to create distrust of the vote.
Again, registration isn’t the same as casting a ballot. Back in 2004 there was ONE case in Franklin county of someone voting more than once and it was an elderly couple who forgot they mailed in an absentee ballot and then voted on election day. They were caught and their extra vote was discarded and they had to have a visit with a judge.
In 99% of the cases ACORN catches bad registrations but by law they are forced to turn in all forms they get. When they do they flag the suspious ones for authorities and they help in any legal actions against their workers.
Franklin County had problems with ACORN in 2004 after authorities discovered dozens of voter registration forms with fake names or false information. A part-time worker for the group was indicted on charges he forged a registration form.
So far this year, officials said they have had 11 challenges to new voter registrations, and about half had been submitted by ACORN. Elections Director Michael Stinziano and Deputy Director Matthew Damschroder said it’s impossible to know how many bad registration cards might get through.
But Damschroder, a Republican, said ACORN has been “markedly better” in the county since 2004, and there’s no evidence of anyone casting a ballot using a fraudulent registration.
I am more worried about GOP voting suppression efforts than I am about false registrations.
