Voter Suppression is the Real Goal

I have to post a short blurb from Atrios followed by a full post from Joshua Marshall that is well worth the read.

This is the crux of the ACORN scandal that the Right is trying to hype. This is not voter fraud ... that happens at the polls and is extremely rare. This is fraud against ACORN by the people they hire to register voters. ACORN staff are not in a position to throw out voter registration forms, they submit them and the states must verify the voter registration forms, then the people at the polling places verify registered voters on election day. There are many checks and balances to the system. Are there a lot of bogus forms showing up in Secretary of State offices around an election? Probably? But their job is to verify them. Was it ACORN's intent to defraud? Doubtful. Anyone - Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Communist -- can fill out a bogus registration form. In most cases, ACORN was flagging questionable forms before submitting them to draw the attention of the verifiers that they needed careful scrutiny. This is another political witchhunt by the politicized Justice Department and their cronies designed to discredit and disenfranchise low income and minority voters.

Here is Atrios:

Voter registration fraud is not voter fraud. In many states people who do voter registration are obligated to turn in forms even they're filled out by "Mickey Mouse." They're a conduit for the forms and don't have the right to determine which ones they turn in.

Here is Josh:

The Gist of the ACORN Story

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way
to stoke the paranoia of their base, lays the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and new legal restrictions on voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So, inevitably someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.

These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phoney registrations ends up being, like, twelve. I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key.

This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for more registering people then they eventually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated casing of actual instances of vote fraud.

To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News ...

"At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.

"But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the
Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.

"Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.

"The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights."

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies.

Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

It's that simple.

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