McCain ACORN Fears Overblown: Experts

[sabra]

Source: ABC News

Charges of Voter Fraud Are Out of Proportion to Reality, They Say

Charges of potential vote fraud volleyed by Republicans, including Sen. John McCain himself, are out of proportion to reality, according to election experts.

The concerns raised by the Republican National Committee in daily conference calls with reporters, as well as by McCain himself in Wednesday's debate focus on the nonprofit group ACORN, whose nationwide voter registration efforts have garnered apparently fraudulent registration cards, some for fictional characters like "Mickey Mouse."

ACORN, whose registration efforts generally target poor neighborhoods, "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy," McCain claimed last night, citing Sen. Barack Obama's ties to the group.

...

"There's no evidence that any of these invalid registrations lead to any invalid votes," said David Becker, project director of the "Make Voting Work" initiative for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Becker should know: he was a lawyer for the Bush administration until 2005, in the Justice Department's voting rights section, which was part of the administration's aggressive anti-vote-fraud effort.

"The Justice Department really made prosecution of voter fraud of this sort a big priority in the first half of this decade, and they really didn't come up with anything," he said.



Read more: http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6049529&page=1

[LynneSin]

1. As I drove into work I saw those 'terrarists' hanging out on the street corner

demanding outrageous stuff like *gasp* HEALTHCARE

:eyes:

As I drove by I honked my horn and gave them a thumbs up. They were at a corner near a neighborhood that is filled with low-income people and they are out there giving a voice to these people. I commend what they are doing!

[ikojo]

8. You don't hear either the Dems or the Republicans

complaining about the partisan efforts of the US Chamber of Commerce. Of course not because both are beholden to donations from big business. Only when people work on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised is it called into question.

[ailsagirl]

2. I wish Obama had said something about McLame's participation

in that 2006 Acorn meeting!!!

[louis-t]

3. The understatement of the year.

"Charges of Voter Fraud Are Out of Proportion to Reality"

[IndyOp]

4. K&R. I am really glad that McCain hacked up this particular furball in the highly public

debate and I'm glad that the corporate media is following up on the statement and finding it full of crap. As a result of doing this sort of reporting they will be predisposed to believe that Republican claims of voter fraud after the election have any validity.

[nichomachus]

5. This is apparently from the "Well Duh Panel of Experts"

Every smear the GOP has made has been overblown.

[tclambert]

6. What are the percentages?

I've heard ACORN hired 13,000 workers to register voters, and they registered 1.3 million of them.

I've heard a few workers were fired for cause, but how many? All I've heard about is four or five. 130 would be 1 percent.

How many bogus registration cards have been identified? I've heard the word "thousands" tossed around. I haven't heard tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. 13,000 would be 1 percent.

Is ACORN being criticized for having "only" a 95% - 99% or better accuracy rate?

They've been registering voters for decades now. How many cases of actual voter fraud have been tied to ACORN? The number I've heard for this key measure is zero.

[underpants]

7. Nothing there never has been-this is really about voter suppression

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/underpants/131

My email to CNN on their ACORN reporting
Posted by underpants in General Discussion
Tue Oct 14th 2008, 12:33 PM
Regarding your reports on ACORN:

Your "Investigative Reporter" has been repeating basically the same misleading report on ACORN for the last few days. He included footage of ACORN offices in Gary Indiana and Milwaukee that had been "closed down". This implies that they scurried out of town or where fly-by-night operations when in fact common sense (and full reporting) would have lead him to the realization that they aren't going to continue paying rent on these offices AFTER registration was over. His report was laden with "allegations" and "investigations" without pointing out that ACORN has never once been charged or indicted let alone convicted of anything. In fact ACORN itself turned in one paid employee when they determined that this worker had acted illegally and that they fully complied with investigations into another former employee.
FACTS on ACORN
http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archiv...

Common sense should have also lead to a consideration of the frequency of actual "voter fraud" (not to be confused with "registration fraud" or "election fraud") and the limited benefit in comparison with the cost. Since 2002 in Ashcroft and Gonzales lead Department of Justice there have been exactly 95 indictments of ALL voter/registration/election frauds in the entire United States.
In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washingt...
What is to be gained by one person trying to create one fraudulent vote? Fine and imprisonment to create one fake vote at one precinct?
It doesn't make sense and it rarely happens.

What DOES happen is voter suppression which you have completely failed to report.
From the 50,000 voters illegally disenfrachised in Florida in 2000
to caging (including active duty military in the Jacksonville Fla. area in 2004)
to mailers telling people to vote on the wrong date or to pay up their utility bills
to the wild changes in registration standards by Ken Blackwell in Ohio in 2004 (he both officially counted the votes and ran Bush's election campaign in Ohio) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Blackwell...
to phone calls telling people that their voting place had changed (Virginia 2006)
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/...
This is only a short list. All of these operations have been from the Republican party either nationally or locally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppres...

Have you completely forgotten about WHY David Iglesias was fired as US Attorney in 2006?
It was because he (and another later fired US Attorney) would not file charges just prior to the mid-term elections.
CHARGES AGAINST ACORN
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/ar...


Only now is this initial report slowly falling apart. I see now that you are finally pointing out that ACORN was contracted during the Democratic primaries by the Obama campaign.

Why does ACORN have to file all registrations that they collect? Because of a 2002 US law changed (when Democrats briefly had a majority in the Senate) as a result of Republican/RNC shadow groups collecting registrations and then dumping them. The person who had thought they registered would show up at the polls to find out that they were not on the rolls.

Report the whole story not just part of it.

[Uncle Joe]

9. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, sabra.