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McCain Camp Tying Obama To ACORN
The McCain campaign is stepping up its efforts to make an issue out of ACORN's voter registration activities -- and one of its new moves is to tie Barack Obama to the beleaguered community organizing group.
On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis raised the specter of massive voter fraud enabling an Obama victory November 4th.
"We don't want to see battleground states turn on ACORN," he said. "We want to make sure not one of these states are (sic) stolen."
Davis continued: "You don't file fake registrations if you're not going to use them to cast fake ballots."
There's little backing to support that contention. According to experts, false registrations almost never result in fraudulent votes, but rather are the result of canvassers artificially juicing their numbers in order to earn a bigger bonus. Tony Romo, for instance, is highly unlikely to try to show up to vote in Las Vegas.
So it bears repeating: despite reports in several swing states that ACORN has submitted fraudulent registration forms in the hundreds, and even perhaps the thousands, there's scant evidence that the group's lapses could significantly affect the integrity of the vote.
But for the McCain campaign, the point of touting the ACORN story is in part to tag Obama as tied to a supposedly radical, lawless community organization that works on behalf of minorities.
Davis noted that Obama had acted as a lawyer for ACORN, and had taught classes to ACORN community organizers. He also asserted that the Obama campaign had paid $800,000 to an ACORN subsidiary to canvass voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas during the primary.
Those claims are all technically true, though they deliberately exaggerate the closeness of the relationship between Obama and ACORN.
Davis also pointed reporters to a website, obamaacorntree.com, detailing the connections between the two.
Josh
Zachary
Headline Typo: "TRYING To Tie Obama to ACORN."
October 10, 2008 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
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October 11, 2008 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know this, coupled with the report of the unsubstantiated attack on Michelle over at Election Central, makes it incredibly hard for me not to associate every republican I know with slimy, underhanded, lying, half-truth techniques.
Ooops. I guess that's guilt by association.
October 10, 2008 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama has every reason to be proud of any association with ACORN. They are an admirable organization doing excellent, difficult work to empower low-income, working-class communities.
The Republicans launch the same bogus attacks on ACORN regularly every two years; it is a standard part of the Republican Party's efforts to disenfranchise working-class voters, especially African-American working-class voters.
Get the facts:
I can only hope that ACORN's voter registration drive will help to offset the Republicans' illegal purging of millions of eligible voters from the rolls, their voter intimidation and disinformation campaigns, and their deliberate sabotaging of polling places in working-class precincts.
October 10, 2008 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fake registrations? Not as many as there are fake accusations spewing from mccain camp and cronies. Davis is as integrity challenged as mccain.
October 10, 2008 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama should make a statement on this soon. First, to explain what is really going on (a la John Marshall's fine article); second, to affirm his commitment to the integrity of the electoral process, which will not only give him the moral high ground, but have the salutary side-benefit of allowing an aggressive Democratic response to the inevitable Republican shenanigans at the polling places. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn that the Republicans are promoting this story in part to gain license for dirty tactics comes election day: Hey, anything goes. Obama should deal with it now and take it off the table before the debate.
October 10, 2008 6:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
the acorn stuff is a PR campaign but the only thing that makes it effective and possibly a general problem around election time is the GOP talk radio monopoly and the coordinated uncontested repetition that only it allows.
October 10, 2008 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Imagine that ACORN has received several suspicious registration forms, which appeared to be pranks or fraud. ACORN is required by law in most states to turn them in anyway, and usually turns them in separately. Verification is the responsibility of the local officials.
This clear rule is intended to prevent groups from collecting registrations and discarding those applicants who appear likely to vote against the wishes of the group. If ACORN had discarded a single suspicious ballot, the GOP would be screaming that the applicant was a Republican and that ACORN was involved in voter suppression.
It seems that some of the bad applications were filed by canvassers intending to collect higher pay. But I'm betting some were completed by Republican operatives in an effort to discredit the work of ACORN.
October 11, 2008 12:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Those are fair points and may well be true. And there is no doubt about the motive you ascribe to the Republican apparatchiks who are promoting this foe their own ends. But none of that should dictate what Obama does. I think it is in his best interest to address this directly. His campaign made a sensible statement yesterday, but I think Obama himself should deal with it in a statement. Heck, Obama may even make all the points you did.
October 11, 2008 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Media are doing a terrible job on this subject. They are not distinguishing between registration fraud and voter fraud. They are blurring the distinctions, and those distinctions are essential.
If someone registers as Elvis Presley or the King of Siam, that's registration fraud. ACORN is forced by law to turn those in. It flags them and turns them in, because they have to by law.
Righties are saying this is voter fraud. Wrong. It's not. It's next to impossible to turn registration fraud into voter fraud, because your polling place won't have The King of Siam on their list. It won't have Elvis Presley. It won't have Mickey Mouse.
99.99999% of the time, registration fraud goes nowhere. But Republicans are using it to mount voter SUPPRESSION drives. If the media don't correct this error, they will be implicitly supporting voter suppression.
We need to push the MSM to correct these errors in definition and explain the immense differences between the two.
October 11, 2008 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's an excellent point, Cuchulain. I took the liberty of linking directly to your post on reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/76lx8/about_that_acorn_stuff_voter_registration_is_not/
October 11, 2008 7:41 PM | Reply | Permalink