I asked an ACORN representative directly yesterday if they'd notified the state about the questionable registrations their Nevada office was raided over. They said:
Yes. From the very beginning. We submitted over 30 packets of suspicious cards, labeled as such, about 700 of the 80,000 we submitted in Clark County. We actually asked them to take action on suspicious cards. It wasn't until July that they opened an investigation, as part of the taskforce they put together with the DOJ. Then we cooperated fully, including turning in everything we'd already turned in AGAIN on 9/29 in response to a subpeona. One week later they raided us as if they didn't know us.
We are required by law to turn in every card, we check every card, we note all problems as we turn them in. We are proactive in flagging problems and turned all this in ourselves.
As ACORN themselves noted, this is like a department store reporting several rush season employees for petty theft, and then being raided by police for supporting a shoplifting ring.
But this is the seasonal work of the Republican Party: to raise suspicions about voters from traditionally Democratic constituencies or geographic regions and either prevent them from voting or cast doubt on efforts to register them. They do it every two years, at least.
Now they have the corrupted apparatus of the Dept. of Justice acting as an organ of their party. Indeed, at least two of the suspiciously fired US Attorneys were fired because they refused to bring vote fraud indictments in cases where they believed there wasn't enough evidence (via). To hear Republicans go on about it though, you'd think it happened all the time and had actually affected an election. But ...
As TocqueDeville explains, this is the most important thing to remember about all claims of registration fraud:
No one has ever been proven to successfully cast an illegal vote as a result of phony voter registration. Ever.
Though as he also tells us, over 60% of the 1.3 million people ACORN has registered are people of color. Which always freaks the GOP right out. The Republicans worked really hard to woo every last Dixiecrat away from the Democratic Party, and good riddance, but now they find themselves with a platform and leadership that America's non-White, non-bigot population finds suspicious at best. That's why the GOP spent a lot of 2002 screaming about evil vote fraud conspiracies on South Dakota Indian reservations, and why they spent 2004 and 2006 distributing misinformation to minority communities about when and whether they could vote; they're just trying to minimize the chances that they'll get their *sses handed to them.
When it comes down to it, the Republican Party simply considers the votes of the poor and people of color to be illegitimate. It's a radical position, but then, these are desperate people. That's not their constituency, not a constituency they have much chance of winning. By the tortured logic that produces the Bush v. Gore decision, it causes material harm to Republicans to let everybody vote who's eligible and then count all those votes. It's their right to run everything, after all.
And so the same Dept. of Justice that seems to be deliberately trying to set Sen. Stevens free is busting a very successful, reputable voter registration drive for problems that they themselves reported. Where they're worried they can't pull that off, they're trying to use foreclosure lists to challenge voters or making sure their isn't anywhere to vote near their homes. Where they can't pull those tricks, they're lying to voters about eligibility and threatening them with arrest, yet again.
Conservatives' deregulatory orgy has brought the economy crashing down around our ears and left too many either with inadequate health care or without any at all. Their bloodlust has cost thousands of lives, destroyed two foreign countries, and keeps us spending $10 billion a month in Iraq. Their stubborn refusal to invest in necessary infrastructure repair has already killed people in Minnesota and New Orleans. All their hope for not being held to account rests in shifting blame for their failures onto minorities.
Now they want four more years of the same and the only thing they have left to ask people to believe in is the hatred that motivates their leaders, like Sarah Palin. While you can probably take that hatred to the bank, I think most people would rather take it to the garbage dump. It's been an exhausting decade, already.
With that, I turn you over to ACORN:
Over the past year, ACORN has worked hard to help over 80,000 people in Clark County register to vote.
Hundreds of canvassers and volunteers have worked for months talking to citizens from Nevada's most disenfranchised communities and encouraging them to exercise their right to participate in our democracy. Their work has been tireless-they deserve a great deal of credit for spending days in the hot sun at public places from parks to community centers to shopping centers helping citizens complete voter registration applications. Most of the 80,000 registrations they have collected and turned in to election officials come from young people, low income people and minorities-the very people whose voices are too often left out of our electorate.
As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, ACORN staff reviews every single application submitted by our canvassers. Special, dedicated staff makes up to three phone calls attempting to reach the voter listed on EVERY SINGLE CARD before they are turned in to verify the information. Our callers verify the information on the cards before turning them in to election officials to make sure that as many new voters as possible get on the rolls and to make sure that all of our voter registration workers are doing the high quality work they are trained to do.
While the vast majority of our voter registration canvassers do a great job, there have been several times over the past ten months that our Las Vegas Quality Control program has identified a canvasser who appears to have knowingly submitted a fake or duplicate application in order to pad his or her hours.
Anytime ACORN quality control staff has identified a suspicious application, we have separated that application out and flagged it for election officials. We turn any suspicious applications to election officials separately, along with a cover sheet identifying the nature of the problem and an offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual. (Note that civic organizations are required by law to turn over ANY signed voter registration applications even when they are known to have problems). We immediately dismiss any employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations. ... |
STATE BLOGS
