From little ACORNs...

grow huge Republican talking points.

I don't know if all media outlets have explained this ACORN flap as well as the ones that I'm lucky enough to be able to watch and listen to. So I thought I'd explain it, as I've heard it explained. If you already know, just skip this!

ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. One way they work for Reform Now is to register people to vote. To do this, they send people to communities where registration is low, which coincidentally happen to be non-white, lower income neighborhoods. (Democratic neighborhoods.) They employ people who really need the work. They pay them by the registration. Sometimes in these communities, they give the people who register a dollar. So people who are in desperate need of money occasionally do things that are less than honest. It might be the people who are being asked to register, and are being offered a dollar. They sign up using the name "Mickey Mouse," or "Michael Jordan" or whatever. Or it might be the people collecting the registrations (remember they get paid by the registration), padding their income. No matter who does it, there are definitely bogus registrations coming in. So here are the two important things to remember:

1. ACORN (and anyone else who registers voters) are required BY LAW to turn in every form they collect to the elections office in their area. And with good reason, we don't want someone going through them and pulling out some, saying "oh, we don't want THIS person to vote, so we'll just "lose" their registration," right? They have to turn them all in. But ACORN actually goes through them and pulls the obviously bogus registrations, puts them in a separate stack and tells the election office, "here, these are clearly bogus." They are doing what they have to do, but they are trying to be helpful.

2. The people who submit the bogus registrations are, yes, absolutely, committing Voter Registration Fraud. But notice that word in the middle that starts with R. Registration. They are NOT committing Voter Fraud, which would be trying to vote more than once, or vote for a person they are not. You don't really think these people plan to show up at the polls with their voter registration card that identifies them as "Mickey Mouse," do you? They did it for the money, not to vote.

So why are the republicans making such a big deal about this? John McCain said this fraud was "tearing the fabric of democracy," or something along those lines. Clearly it isn't, but they are making a big deal about it so that when Obama wins, they can point to this "fraud" and use it to claim that Obama's presidency isn't legitimate. (Hmmm, like anyone else we know?) The Republicans should remember, they are the ones that need to steal elections, not the Democrats.

Oh, and one more thing. The Republicans tried to prosecute ACORN for this Voter Registration Fraud prior to the 2006 election. They filed complaints with the US Attorneys offices about "voter fraud," which were then investigated by US Attorneys offices. It was found that there were no grounds for prosecution. This didn't please some Republican office-holders, so they complained (apparently) to Karl Rove, which led to the firing of some US Attorneys, including David Iglesias. (I'll tell you a little about him in my next post.) You may have heard of the US Attorneys Scandal. This is the root of it, the fact that they investigated this type of voter registration fraud prior to the 2006 election, and found nothing to prosecute.