ACORN: The Real Truth

McCain/Palin and the rabid right wing media have been going after the ACORN story hard out of desperation. They realize now that McCain is most likely going to lose to Obama and it seems that they are looking for someway to deligitimize Obama's victory because for these people it's always "party first" and "country last."

Sadly for them there's actually nothing to the ACORN story. The idea that ACORN is committing "voter fraud" is based on a false premise. The fact is that ACORN only helps people to register to vote, it has nothing to do with the actual voting nor the counting of votes.

The accusation is that ACORN is purposefully registering thousands of fake names in order to help Obama/Biden. The problem with this theory is that doing that wouldn't help Obama/Biden at all. Why? Because fake people can't actually vote, even if they are registered (and most fake names never make it to the point of actually being registered anyway!) A fake person would need a fake ID and a fake address in order to vote. Do you really think a lot of people are going that far out of there way just to vote twice? Does that make any sense? No.

The truth is that ACORN is not purposefully registering any fake names. They are not the perpertater of voter registration fraud (which is what this is, not voter fraud, there's a huge difference) - no, in fact they are the victim. How is that? Well take a look at how this happens:

1. ACORN hires employees to register people to vote because they want as many people registered to vote as possible. Anything wrong with that? There certainly shouldn't be in a democracy. It should be the goal of all people who truly believe in a Democracy that as many people as possible are registered to vote.

2. Some of their employees (like some of the employees at any large organization) are lazy and don't do their work but want to be paid anyway. So what do they do? They fill out fake name registrations.

3. ACORN makes an effort to make all suspicious registrations themselves before sending them into election boards. They are required by law to send all of the registrations they collect in, that's why they do not simply throw them out.

4. Once the registration forms get to the election boards, they go through their own process for verifying the veracity of the registrations. Only those that pass that process are actually registered to vote.

You see when some of ACORN's employees fill out fake voter registrations this is not a good thing for ACORN, or for Obama/Biden because these fake registrations don't vote! But do you know what they do? They waste time and money for the organization. It becomes clear by actually looking at the facts that ACORN is the victim and has done absolutely nothing wrong.

What's disturbing is that those who are spreading these lies know exactly that. When McCain/Palin and the GOP/FOX News lie about ACORN they know that they are lying. They are just hoping that you (the voter) are not smart enough to realize that.

Even more disturbing is that it's actually the Republicans who have been caught many times over committing real voter fraud (including famously in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004) via voter caging and voter suppression.