President Barack Hussein Obama and First Lady Michelle; get used to hearing that for the next eight years wingnut. Wingnuts, fundies and racists heads are exploding over this and I am overjoyed that it is so.

Sorry Al, I just can’t stand these lizard-brained morans (spelling is deliberate, look the photo up )

ACORN is an organization which works to register poor and inner-city people, who incidentally happen to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats (this fact should be incidental… everyone has the right to vote, and ACORN is trying to ensure that everyone can exercise that right). ACORN doesn’t pay people per registration they turn in, they pay people hourly, but they have some pretty aggressive registration quotas which, if toned down, would probably help them to prevent the sorts of problems we saw this year. They are required by law to turn in every registration form they receive from a canvasser to the relevant state registration office, because to not do so would potentially be voter suppression. If they find a registration that is potentially fraudulent, they flag it as such before sending it to the state, so that the state knows there may be (or even is) something wrong with the form. Filling out a phony registration form is not voter fraud, it’s voter registration fraud, which is a completely different beast. For those fake registrations to impact the election, someone would actually have to show up in a polling place and try to vote as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or one of the Green Bay Packers (in Arizona at least… presumably the Green Bay Packers would be allowed to vote in their home state ;)). Federal investigations over the past several elections have found so little evidence of registration fraud translating into actual voter fraud that several federal attorneys were unable to prosecute cases given to them by the administration (and were summarily fired… you may have heard the stick on that one).

ACORN has cooperated with every investigation into its dubious registration forms, and in many cases even alerted authorities to the regularities they were seeing so that those problems could be investigated. Several individuals have, in the past, been tried and sentenced for their actions, and I suspect such will be the same this year. Nothing in the news over the past 2 years has indicated that there was anything malicious in the actions of those tried for their actions (remember, they were actually put in court, which is already light-years above the result of the Virginia investigation into possible voter suppression with those “Democrats vote Wednesday” fliers). The people involved were usually either lazy bastards who just filled out piles of registration forms at home, or felt they were under pressure due to the target quotas set by ACORN, so they fabricated forms to make up the difference. Both are wrong, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you that their behavior was acceptable, because that would be silly. As I said, I think ACORN could stand to lower its quotas if it wants to see this sort of behavior from its local employees go away. However, I feel I need to once again stress these points: this is not voter fraud, it’s registration fraud, and further, the people who were committing this fraud were, in numerous cases, put on trial for it (I don’t think anything has gone to court yet this year, but such has been the case in previous elections, including one or two cases in Washington from 2006). In the case of the Virginia fliers which could potentially have removed numerous Democratic votes from the ballot in a state where the race is either polling closely or swinging in a non-typical direction, no-one was prosecuted for their actions, a fact which you conveniently failed to recognize in your response. Tell me, had this stunt been reversed and Republican voters had been told to vote on the 5th by those fliers, would you be so flippant about it? Are you at all angered or even remotely frustrated by these Republican-favoring efforts to damage our election system, or only when such behavior would favor the Democrats?

The accusation from John McCain at the second debate that ACORN was on the verge of “undermining the fabric of our democracy” is complete partisan alarmist bullshit from someone who, in 2006, praised ACORN for the work they were doing in registering new voters. Yes, several ACORN employees have behaved completely inappropriately by filing fraudulent registration forms and subsequently defrauding their employer, but to accuse ACORN the organization of intentionally perpetrating the greatest case of voter fraud in American history (which is already false, they’re not voting as Mickey Mouse, they’re turning in - and flagging - registration forms for Mickey Mouse, which once again, is registration fraud) is completely and patently false, and Senator McCain should be responsible enough to know the difference, and retract that statement. Further, ACORN has been cooperative in all investigations into fraudulent registration forms, and the people who do it are typically brought to justice for their actions. The gulf between ACORN and the actions of Republican-leaning individuals in Virginia and Ohio is so enormously massive, they’re not even on the same continent. Hell, the gulf between ACORN’s actual transgressions and the ones being leveled against it by McCain’s campaign is equally massive, but hey, don’t let the actual facts stand in the way of some good old-fashioned Dem-bashing.

–TSK