As every FOX viewer knows, FOX News has spent weeks smearing ACORN for registering 1.3 million low- and moderate-income voters.
FOX insists ACORN is deliberately filing bogus voter registrations to allow ineligible voters to vote. ACORN admits a small number of employees have filed bogus registrations to keep their jobs, but ACORN also insists it reviews every registration and flags bogus ones for election officials so they don't get added to the voter rolls. ACORN also encourages law enforcement to prosecute employees who commit such fraud. (Watch Bertha Lewis respond.)
Republicans have attacked ACORN for non-existent voter fraud since 2004. This charge was investigated by Tova Wang of the Brennan Center at the request of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and found baseless; the Republican-controlled EAC suppressed the report for two years.
As Josh Marshall reminds us, this scam was at the heart of the U.S. attorney scandal:
The firings were one thing. But the story behind the firings, what led to them, is key to understanding the current 'vote fraud' scam being played by the Republicans and the media outlets that are going along with the scam.
Remember, the US Attorneys in question were all either Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. In every case, they were appointed by George W. Bush. In most of the cases their firing was tied to 'vote fraud' claims stemming from the 2004 election.
The pattern was very consistent. During the final weeks of the 2004 campaign Republican partisans started pressing claims of widespread voter fraud. In many, though not all cases, the examples they pointed to were not even allegations of voter fraud, but allegations of voter registration fraud: examples of people being registered more than once, non-existent people being registered, etc.
The Republicans making these claims argued that these problems with registration cards were opening the coming election up to widespread vote fraud. Logically, this makes no sense. And, more importantly, all evidence shows this has never happened, certainly not in any widespread sense. Every person who claims otherwise is either ignorant or speaking in bad faith.
Democrats.com wants to stop all election fraud. So here's our challenge: if you (a) find "Mickey Mouse" or other fictional characters who get past the screeners and end up on voter rolls, and (b) prove that they were able to cast a vote, we will pay you $100 - and forward your evidence of voter fraud to local authorities for prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.
Post your findings below and we will investigate them. If you find a rat (or a mouse), you'll get some cheese!
Update 1: Investigative reporter Greg Palast has researched election fraud more thoroughly than anyone in the Corporate Media, and here's what he told Buzzflash about massive voter disenfranchisement by corrupt election officials:
- In the swing state of Colorado, we found that the Republican Secretary of State wiped out 19.4% - one in five - voter names in an unnoticed mass purge.
- In swing-state New Mexico, in the February caucus, one in nine Democrats found their names missing from the voter rolls supplied by the State. The elections supervisor of San Miguel County - whose own name was missing from the rolls - has no confidence the state contractors will fix it. Our statistical analysis showed there was a direct relationship between your name and your race and income. The poor and the dark were disappeared.
- In Indiana, you heard about 10 nuns who lost their vote because their ID - drivers' licenses - had expired (they were all over eighty). But what about the others? We've calculated that 143,000 others were turned away - disproportionately Blacks and new voters.
And what about voting fraud by corrupt voters, which is the centerpiece of the ACORN smear campaign?
there are only about SIX voters found guilty of federal voting fraud in a year. SiX! Out of 178 million registered voters.
So the GOP (and Fox and CNN) are running stories about ACORN signing up zillions of illegal voters. Yep, there are a handful of phony names - but 'Mary Poppins' has never shown up to vote.
However, the Republican cry of 'Vote Fraud!' has become the cover for purges and challenges to legal voters by the millions.
I even tracked down and filmed some of these so-called fraudulent voters handed me from a GOP list. Every one was a legal voter.
Update 2: Brad Friedman explains how ACORN itself is exposing all of its "crimes":
Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.
Update 3: Jane Hamsher is utterly (and rightly) baffled by ACORN's Mickey Mouse Plan for World Domination:
The St. Petersberg Times today says that "Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer. Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which was stamped with the logo of the nonprofit group ACORN."
If that was the plan, don't you think they'd pick a name that was, oh I don't know, a bit less likely to raise red flags than "Mickey Mouse?" Many of the registration forms flagged by ACORN were incomplete. If their intention was to stuff the ballot box on election day, don't you think they'd do a better job of dummying them up?...
conservatives rarely understand how things work. They don't take the time and don't have the minds. We're thus treated to a lot of smoldering innuendo, a bunch of supposedly damning facts, but what they think the ultimate Acorn conspiracy is never really comes together into a concrete plan. We're all just supposed to nod knowingly, assume that "where there's smoke there's fire," and repeat John McCain's talking points until told to do otherwise.
Update 4: dday explains what actual election fraud looks like:
In 2002, Republican operatives in New Hampshire jammed the phone lines of the state Democratic Party on Election Day while they were attempting to organize get-out-the-vote efforts. This impacted thousands of volunteers and party operatives who were trying to ensure their voters turned out to elect Jeanne Shaheen over Sen. John Sununu. Sununu ended up winning by a few percentage points*, close to the margin expected from a successful ground game. Allen Raymond, one of the architects of the scheme, went to jail for it and wrote a tell-all book called How To Rig An Election. Raymond acknowledged that there were dozens of phone calls between his team and Ken Mehlman in the White House leading up to Election Day. And today, James Tobin, another operative, was indicted for lying to the FBI about the operation.
That would fall under the category of ACTUAL election fraud. It was targeted at a specific race, and it sought to impact thousands of potential voters at once by disabling Democratic GOTV efforts in a form of voter suppression. Contrast this with registering one voter named "Mickey Mouse" at a time, telling election officials about it, and then hoping it slips past them and that someone in a mouse suit shows up to the ballot box on Election Day.
But when looking at the reporting about these kinds of incidents, the very real election fraud isn't mentioned, and examples of the system working, where election monitors catch bad registrations ahead of time and nobody fraudulent actually votes, becomes the scandal of the century. It's enough to make you wonder if some outside force is driving the discussion other than the very independent media.
I eagerly anticipate the first mention of Tobin's indictment on cable news.
Update 5: PFAW president Kathryn Kolbert reports on today's GOP press conference with former Senators John Danforth (who proudly gave us Clarence Thomas) and Warren Rudman (who famously opposed budget deficits until fellow Republican Ronald Reagan moved into the White House):
today’s press conference was just the latest effort by the GOP to justify voter suppression under the guise of so-called election integrity. As in the past, Republicans have latched onto a few colorful but insignificant examples – e.g. a man who was registered to vote 73 times and a 7-year-old child who was registered – to advocate for draconian enforcement measures that disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters, typically minority and low-income voters.
But there are already safeguards in place that prevent people who submit fraudulent voter registrations from actually voting. In fact, there is no evidence of significant voter fraud of any variety anywhere in the nation. At the urging of the GOP, the Justice Department sought evidence of fraud but came up empty-handed.
However, there is evidence for significant vote suppression and disenfranchisement. As the New York Times reported last week: “Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law.” This is what Danforth and Rudman would have talked about today if they really cared about election integrity.
They also would have talked about the various barriers to voting that members of their party have erected, like rejecting voter registration forms not printed on 80-pound bond paper or requiring names on voter registration forms to exactly match records in existing databases (e.g. Mike R. Neuman would be rejected if listed elsewhere as Michael R. Neuman). Or how about the strict voter ID laws put in place by Republicans? They seem reasonable enough, until you consider that millions of voting-age Americans (perhaps as high as 10%) do not have driver’s licenses.
The logic behind the GOP’s efforts is as simple as it is undemocratic: the fewer people who vote, the better off Republicans candidates will be.
