Talk about subtle

Republican commentators have been talking about ACORN for months, and it’s just now starting to get mainstream media attention as the McCain campaign tries to tie Barack Obama to the group. The Association for Community Organization Reform Now (ACORN) is accused of fraudulently registering thousands of voters in Ohio, Indiana and other swing states by having people fill out forms multiple times, registering the name of deceased people and fictional characters, not to mention celebrities, and sometimes offering crack cocaine and money to people to fill out voter registration forms. This led to thousands of fraudulent forms being filed, something the group had also been accused of in 2004, again in Ohio.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a really ugly, unfortunate mess. Particularly if ACORN were giving drugs to homeless and low-income people to fill out voter registration forms – talk about cynical! However, the attempt to paint this as voter fraud and Republican claims that this could cause Democrats to steal the election (gee, that’s rich) misses the real issue here, for two big reasons. One, this isn’t voter fraud – it’s voter registration fraud. That’s still a grave concern, but it’s not the same thing as voter fraud. And second, while voter-registration fraud is certainly a problem, it’s less likely to cause an election to be stolen than voters being purged from the rolls. That, on the other hand, is an issue that isn’t getting nearly enough press.

Now, as recently as 48 years ago, in the 1960 election between Nixon and Kennedy, Kennedy was alleged to have won because many dead people and made-up voters cast votes for the candidate in states like Illinois and Texas. This was also something that happened for many years in previous elections, and was even parodied in that 1996 Chris Farley classic Black Sheep. Basically, this doesn’t become actual voter fraud until or unless these made up people actually cast their votes.

Here’s the thing, though: as time has gone on, with advancing technology and media, tactics like this are far easier to catch. Going through the voter rolls and finding deceased people casting their votes, not to mention people being registered multiple times, is easier to find because the names are right there on the page. If Chris Farley could figure it out in Black Sheep, that really says it all. But don’t misunderstand – voter registration fraud is still dangerous, particularly with electronic voting machines that could, theoretically, simply add votes to a candidate’s total. 

Purging voters from the rolls and disenfranchising them, however, is far more dangerous and tangible. Perhaps the most famous example of this came when a system to purge felons in Florida before the 2000 election ended up disenfranchising thousands of black voters – in a state that Al Gore ended up “officially” losing by 537 votes. Stories over the past few months have discussed how easy it is to disenfranchise voters in this fashion, one even mentioning that a woman had purged 10,000 votes from county rolls from her home computer.

I’ll say it again: voter registration fraud is dangerous and it’s a problem. But purging of voter rolls is more immediately dangerous because it stops people who are actually at the polls from voting. Yes, it’s atrocious to have fake names and deceased people on voter rolls, but how many votes actually get cast under these names? Do these people all show up to the polls brandishing fake IDs with these names on them? Sure, it’s possible. But it’s far easier to just delete a bunch of names from one’s home computer.

Plus, voter registration fraud, as I said, is much easier to expose. If we find on November 5th that Tony Romo, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Batman and Jack Bauer voted for Barack Obama in Montana or something, that’s immediately damning because the evidence is right there in the form of fraudulent ballots. However, blaming thousands of people being unable to vote on computer and human error is comparatively easy to explain away – there’s often no physical evidence.

In short, the anger and vitriol over ACORN needs to be redirected to make sure that voter purging on a wide, erroneous, unfair scale is not happening – on both sides of the aisle. Voter purging is dangerous from the start – it stops people from voting, period. Voter registration fraud, however, is two-stage. Fraudulent forms are filed – but those people still need to show up to vote. I’m not sure how often that actually happens, but it is much easier to catch than something that wasn’t on the voter rolls to begin with (perhaps because it had been purged). 

If you ask me, what I think is really going on is that ACORN is likely committing fraud on multiple levels. However, I think it’s more like business fraud – akin to exaggerating profits to drive up a stock price. ACORN staffers are trying to show how successful the organization is in registering voters, so they’re doing everything they can to get a crapload of registered voters so that they can publicize their voter registration and organizational prowess. That’s despicable and wrong, but it doesn’t have the immediate impact on the voter rolls that purging does. Now, if they’re trying to get people to go to the polls and falsely claim that they’re different individuals, that’s another story. We can’t know if that’s going to happen until election day, but with that said we need to make sure that this doesn’t continue and that these erroneous voters get scrutinized and taken off the rolls if need be.

All in all, it comes down to this: if ballots filled out by Disney characters surface in the days after the election, we’ll know about it. But we might not necessarily know about thousands of voters who were turned away at the polls. We need to pay attention to the bigger danger here, or else we’re allowing ourselves to be misled while a real crime gets perpetrated behind our backs. That doesn’t sound at all like the last eight years.

Obama: We don’t need ACORN’s help [CNN]