Four weeks ago most people in the United States had never heard of ACORN.
But then the entire apparatus of the GOP started a concerted and coordinated campaign of attacks and smears on us, reaching a zenith of sorts when John McCain attacked us during the last Presidential debate in front of 50 million viewers, saying that we “may be destroying the fabric of democracy”.
So now the whole country knows about ACORN – a Time/CNN poll this week shows that we are known by 86% likely voters in Virginia, a state in which we have never had a serious presence. Some of us, in trying to make light of what has been a trying time, to say the least, have joked that “we don’t care what they say about us, as long as the get our name right.” But that make-shift levity doesn’t change the cold hard facts behind the unrelenting assault on ACORN.
This week, we’ve fought back, and today, we’re asking John McCain to stop the lies. More below the fold.
These attacks, carried out by the McCain Campaign, the Republican National Committee, and various surrogates on the state and local levels, including the once-honorable ex-Sens. John Danforth and Warren Rudman, have been among the most vicious of the 2008 election.
The attacks on ACORN are spurious to say the least. Here a few key facts that our accusers aren’t telling you.
ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.
ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.
Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.
The rate of incomplete cards for the drive was 5 percent (about 65,000 cards) and the rate of “suspicious” cards was 1.5 percent (about 19,500 cards).
Those are just the highlights; we have an entire section of our website, The Real ACORN, dedicated to telling the truth about ACORN’s work.
ACORN is accustomed to opposition. We've been educating, organizing, and empowering low-income communities for nearly 40 years. Our signature campaigns have included raising the minimum wage through ballot initiative campaigns in 2004 in Florida, and again in 2006 in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Ohio. This work helped provide momentum for that national minimum wage hike that passed in 2007. We have been at the forefront of the fight against the predatory lending practices. We are also the group now helping people save their homes from foreclosure.
We’ve come a long way in nearly 40 years: from a small group of women on welfare in Little Rock, Arkansas coming together in the summer of 1970 to the national bogeyman for the Right in their desperate attempts to cling to power here at the end of 2008. I can tell you that you make some enemies when you advocate with and for poor people against policies and practices that discriminate and keep communities from thriving. But we've never seen anything like this.
And now, in the past few weeks alone, ACORN staffers have received death threats in Ohio and Rhode Island, and offices have been vandalized in Washington and Massachusetts. Numerous threatening and racist phone calls have been made to ACORN offices across the country. As the Right’s actions have made plain, what’s at stake here is not simply what happens on November 4th, but whether or not American citizens will be able to exercise their most basic right: the right to vote.
This week we’ve begun to carry the fight back to the Republicans. On Monday we showed that the New Mexico GOP was falsely accusing Latino and African-American registrants, many of them first-time voters, of illegally voting in the June primary. When confronted with the evidence the GOP tried to run from the story.
On Wednesday we released a report called “Insult to Injury” about a GOP election strategy for suppressing votes by challenging voters at the polls using foreclosure filings as a basis to prove the voter no longer lives at that address. The report shows that in six states, the margin in the 2004 Presidential Election was smaller than the number of people who have faced foreclosure in 2008: Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin. Caging efforts in these states can have an impact on the outcome of the 2008 election.
The problem is, we will have to suffer the consequences of these intense attacks long after the election is over. We need your help and we need it now. So, I hope you'll also spread the word. It will take millions of people to shut down the assault and stop the lies. Take a minute to watch the Brave New Films video that tells the truth about ACORN, and make sure as many other people as possible do as well. And contribute something if you can.
I want to take this opportunity to give special thanks to the Netroots for their hard work and sacrifice in coming to the defense of ACORN at a time when we were struggling hard with our initial responses to these baseless and contemptible, but staggeringly voluminous, attacks. You realized that this fight isn’t just about ACORN, it isn’t just about the 2008 elections, it is fundamentally about democracy in America. It is about who gets to have their voices heard and who gets theirs silenced. Let’s the pushback going. Tell McCain to stop lying. Send the video to your friends.Contribute whatever you can. Let’s keep our election from being stolen.
Thank you so very much for taking a moment to support ACORN while we're in the fight of our lives.
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