A Litany of Shame: Voter Suppression in 2008

Why isn't this kind of dirt more prevalent in our media?

The conservative selling point about bringing democracy to Iraq sounds more hollow with their true actions on their destruction of ours.

Somehow, this just doesn't surprise me in the least. Had it be put in the form of a question, I'd have bet the farm on my answer.

Nor I. What is more surprising is that the "normal" conservatives aren't challenging this kind of crime against our democracy.

Are you kidding me? The left is rounding up any and every thing with a heartbeat to steal the election.

Updated 8:55 p.m.
By Mary Pat Flaherty
The Nevada office of ACORN had planned a potluck dinner at its Las Vegas office Tuesday night to celebrate the 80,000 newly registered voters its staff had signed up in Clark County as part of its work with low-income communities nationwide.

Instead, their office was raided Tuesday morning by agents of the Nevada Secretary of State and Attorney General who alleged in an application for a search warrant that ACORN had hired 59 felons through a work release program as canvassers and submitted nearly 300 apparently fraudulent voter registration cards as part of the drive.

The submitted voter cards included addresses and names that do not exist in Nevada, duplicate registrations, names culled from telephone books and names of Dallas Cowboys players, an investigator for the Secretary of State alleged in his affidavit for a search warrant.

One ex-employee of ACORN reached by the state investigator told him she began making up names for her forms on days when it was too hot to work outside. ACORN canvassers are paid by the hour. Ex-employees also said they were expected to collect 20 complete forms a shift or risk probation and termination, the investigator said in his affidavit.

The search drove ACORN and its critics to exchange charges of political maneuvering in a battleground state that voted Republican in the 2004 presidential election but is considered in play for November. Mail-in voter registration closed Saturday in Nevada.

Agents removed 20 boxes of documents and eight computer hard drives from the ACORN office in "an ongoing investigation," said Secretary of State Ross Miller, a Democrat. "Now we begin the task of sifting through the material that was seized to determine how widespread any fraud might be."

No arrests were made yesterday and no ACORN staff were in the office during the raid.

ACORN officials said they were stunned by the search because they had unilaterally identified and flagged suspicious voter registration cards to the county elections board starting in July and had been cooperating with authorities to cull bad information and fire workers who collected that information, said Brian Mellor, senior counsel for Project Vote.

Project Vote relies on staff from ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, to do field level voter drives.

ACORN's internal checks, Mellor said, included tracking forms assigned to canvassers using serial numbers and worker sign-offs on each form and following up with listed voters by phone to verify they had taken part in the registration drive. The search warrant mentions those procedures.

That cooperation and meetings with state officials also are mentioned in the search affidavit, as is a subpoena from the state that was delivered to ACORN in September asking the group to resubmit information on several employees it had previously turned over to county elections officials. The forms were resubmitted, Mellor said.

"The raid was a stunt designed perhaps to make them look tough on voter fraud," said Matthew Henderson, the southwest regional director for ACORN. "We don't think fraud is a rampant problem. This was a politically motivated stunt, that is all there is to it because those new voters can reshape the electorate of Nevada."

Henderson said many voters registered through ACORN are "working people and people of color and there may be corners of the political world where a high injection of new voters like those is unsettling some."

The state is one of several viewed as a battleground. The Secretary of State and Attorney General are Democrats.

"If this were a stunt I would have put Ross (Miller) out there with a shotgun like Buford Pussey," said Miller's spokesman, Bob Walsh. "I'll grant them their cooperation, though it is grossly dishonest not to bring up the felons in their official statements they released."

But, said Walsh, "at the end of the day, it is our job, not ACORN's, to enforce election law and that is why we acted."

In July, the two Nevada state agencies involved in the raid, along with the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office for Nevada, formed a task force to target voter registration and election fraud and complaints over voter registration practices, potential voter fraud, and enforcement of laws regarding voter intimidation. The federal agents were not part of Tuesday's search, Walsh said.

Registration drives conducted by ACORN in several states are under scrutiny by local elections officials for the accuracy of cards gathered by its workers.

Mellor said that problems with duplicate registrations -- for people already registered who sign on during a drive -- have been a problem that ACORN is working to eliminate because those cards burden local elections boards who must process them. He also noted that the group has worked with local authorities in St. Louis and Kansas City in the past on investigations. But the Nevada search, he said, "is the first raid I can recall."

ACORN has been the object of heated denunciations from the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign, which contend the group is attempting to overwhelm election officials with new registrations that are carelessly gathered and would enable unqualified voters to get on the rolls.

"It is very difficult to ascribe any other motive to the activities of ACORN other than to swamp the system with registrations cards" that range from illegible to being drawn from names from telephone listings or other public directories, said RNC Chief Counsel Sean Cairncross. Cairncross spoke Tuesday during a telephone press conference on another ACORN voter drive in northwest Indiana that local news accounts report is under review by elections officers.

The ACORN drives, he said, "point to a lack of control in this organization" and "a willingness to go out and do this relentlessly."

The McCain and Obama camps have been trading blasts and Internet alerts over Republican charges that ACORN has been closely linked to Barack Obama for years, a contention the Obama campaign denies.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/07/acorn_nevada_offices_raided.

You side just got caught and Obama is a liar.

Many of the examples I see first when quickly scanning the article above center on the requirement of proof of citizenship. I'm not sure what you think is wrong with that. As to the other, real cases of turning away eligible voters, they don't seem to be mentioned in the mainstream press very much, so, so I assume that they're very rare.

You mean "rare" makes it legal?

No. Did I say that? I was trying to speculate as to why there isn't much outcry about it. But with an immense number of communities, one has to expect that some tiny percentage would have problems with dishonest voting organizations. Is there some reason to believe that it's worse than historically? It doesn't seem to make the newpapers very much. I also said that asking for proof of citizenship isn't immoral or improper.

The answer was obvious wasn't it? I was being sarcastic. "Very rare" doesn't make it right, and the people who are fair-minded in the conservative party should be outraged, but we have heard nothing. Their silence is deafening.

Why would we be outraged if the level of voter suppression is the same as it's been for the past century? I don't know that that's the case, but I certainly don't see much about it in the papers.

Maybe, just because, it's wrong?

I think the issue is that there appears to be an organized effort to throw obstacles in the way of legitimate voters. We're not talking about accidents or misunderstandings here. As for proof of citizenship, I don't carry proof of citizenship around with me. The only real proof of citizenship is a birth certificate or a passport (which requires a birth certificate). That means that anyone without their birth certificate handy can't register. It would probably take me a half hour to find mine and I'm a decent record keeper. I can imagine it would be a lot harder for some, especially if they never had one and had to mail off for it. This requirement also shuts down voter registration drives. Kind of hard to take an opportunity to register on the spur of the moment when you have to present a birth certificate. What about insisting that voter ID match government databases? If the government makes an error, you don't get to vote. I love the Florida solution: You have two days to report to the registrar's office with proof that you are right. How many people are going to bother doing that? Why are people from out of state coming into swing states to challenge voters at the polls? It's organized and it's wrong. That's the problem.

Did you read your own article? Let me capture the salient points.
- Of 80,000 new registered voters, 300 applications are questionable, less than one half of one percent.
- ACORN employees admitted to falsifying some applications to avoid work, not as part of any organized conspiracy and unbeknown to their employers.
- The organization implemented safeguards to prevent issues such as these and worked with state authorities to identify issues and fire workers who filed false paperwork.
- There have been no arrests in this case.

ACORN workers have been harassed in several states in their attempts to register voters. Once again, here is an organized effort to prevent voter registration. I don't see any side getting "caught" and I'm not sure why you think this makes Obama a liar. I do see a continued pattern of voter suppression by Republicans.

It makes NO DIFFERENCE whether there is 1 acknowledged fraudulent application, 30 or 3,000.

You approve of their action and supported the bailout since it gave MILLIONS to this racist organization.

This doesn't sound like an attempt to suppress voters as much as it sounds like an attempt to make sure the laws are followed.

If a law has been on the books since 2004 or 2006 you don't think 2 or 4 years is enough time to get your own personal issues resolved? Most states have motor voter laws, meaning you register to vote when you get a drivers license. You can also go to the DMV and register to vote. If you haven’t had time in 2 or 4 years to get this done then that is your fault. If voting was that important then people would make the time to make sure they are good to go. If you wait till the month before the vote then once again that is your own fault. Remember the story about the ant and the grasshopper? These people waiting till the last minute are the hopper not the ants.

Most state laws require that when you move that you have 30 days to get your license changed to reflect your address change. At the time of getting your new license wouldn't you then register to vote?

Why does it only seem to affect people who vote Democratic? Why don't you see these same issues with people who vote Republican?

I'm outraged that some tiny fraction of people are most likely denied the right to vote, but I don't think about it much, since I don't see anything about it in the paper, and have no reason to believe that it's more than at any time in the past century or two.

How do you know that? Maybe there's an organized effort to throw obstacles in the way of illegitimate voters. There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, some citizens with the right to vote may be denied access. On the other, non-citizens may be voting. Both of these alternatives are bad, and any solution which doesn't address the requirement that non-eligible people shouldn't be voting will be unacceptable. When I vote no one asks me about citizenship. Maybe these local election boards don't have access to the relevant government data to do the checking you describe. It's not a solution for them if they can't actually access the data necessary do it.

Here in New Mexico, we finally have to show a photo ID to vote. Not a single Republican protested that requirement, but it has taken us forever to get it through a Democratic legislature that insisted that we would be disenfranchising people if we require that they prove who they are so that they can be ruled eligible before they vote. Evenso, though we are small in population, we are usually the last state to finish counting votes because so many people ignore the registration deadline and show up to vote and are allowed to do so. It takes forever to then check out who is eligible and who isn't, and nobody has confidence that much care is taken in that process.

I can't remember the last close election in which a 'forgotten' ballot box didn't mysteriously appear and had to be counted.

There was much less fraud and problems when the state had strict residency requirements, enforced a reasonable deadline for registration, and only those eligible to vote were allowed to do so. We would have the results a few hours after the polls close.

I don't think such rules are in any way out of line and they disenfranchise nobody. It is far more likely that people who care enough to go by the rules will be people who actually know who they are voting for and why which is a much healthier situation than somebody dragged off the street and shoved into the polling place with the name they are supposed to vote for so they can receive their five dollars or whatever. Yes this has happened. And it makes for a lot less hanky panky as we see in activities of ACORN.

Except this issue has received a lot of attention and study and the conclusions are always the same. There is no indication of significant voter fraud or illegitimate voting. There is ample evidence that these programs reduce voter registration and intimidate voters from coming to the polls. Faced with this data, why continue these programs?

D-Day (Divorce Day) cometh.....