McCain Camp Tying Obama To ACORNThe 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.