BY TAYLOR MARSH
It’s all ACORN’s fault. The mortgage crisis, the collapse in the market. The minorities did it. It’s all Barack Obama’s fault. Damn those community organizers.
That’s what wingnut radio is trumpeting, as is the GOP. McCain and his pals over at Fox love this story, too, as do conservative writers and bloggers.
Republicans suddenly getting religion on voting rights is laughable. No single party has kept more people from voting in the history of this country. That goes double if the voters are in minority communities.
As for ACORN, they’ve got a pr problem at the very least. But the voter fraud stories aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Sometimes it’s simply politics. Think Katherine Harris:
Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer, a Republican, requested registration cards and address change forms Thursday for all 302 people who took advantage of the window. He told elections officials he had been inundated with phone calls from people concerned about possible fraud.
BradBlog has much more and covers voter fraud intensely. Dave Johnson is working hard on an election protection Wiki.
Besides, nothing compares to the systematic voter purging of the roles, intimidation and out right strategy to depress the vote, or keep people who have lost their homes from voting, as Republicans unveiled in Michigan back in September:
The Obama campaign yesterday went to court to block what it alleged was an attempt by Republicans in Michigan to stop people who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis from voting in November’s election.
The suit, filed in a Michigan court yesterday, is the latest sign of contention over voting procedures. Voting rights activists in several battleground states have reported an aggressive push by Republican elected officials and activists to make it harder to vote.
Voting in this country isn’t perfect. Did you know? But the problems we have are so much larger than registration. We can’t even verify votes on election day. All these years after 2000, nobody in Congress has worked hard enough to make our voting system work.
But clearly, Republicans love this ACORN story because they think it will provide them the cover and the activist engine to explain if McCain loses in a landslide. It also gives them an opportunity to stir the hatred of “racism” if Obama wins.
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