At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America's Founders had been "community organizers" -- like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren't like that any more. Mr. Obama's kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country.
APAcorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We've written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain's campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn's ties to Mr. Obama. It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government
The WSJ published another "voter fraud" editorial, today, trying to link Obama and ACORN to some kind of national conspiracy to subvert election law.
You can read it yourself
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122394051071230749.html> here
My reply:
This editorial is well written, albeit transparently partisan and misleading.
In order to make the point that Obama is supporting groups that "subvert election law," our author points to numerous "allegations" of illegal voter registration applications by ACORN, a grass roots coalition of community organizers.
They have over 13,000 employees. Certainly there are a few bad apples. After all, just look at the Congress--where Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Charles Rangel and others constituted a much higher percentage of "bad apples" than ACORN.
On the other hand, since almost every piece of "evidence" cited in this editorial against ACORN's legitimacy and the legality of its voter registration drives is either hearsay, "allegations," or "statements," the reader is left wondering what all the fuss is about.
ACORN is trying to register Americans to vote. We have the lowest percentage of voter participation of any democratic country.
What our eloquent editorialist doesn't mention however, is that, for the most part, the "fraudulent" applications that are discarded by election boards after having been submitted by ACORN and reviewed, were first flagged by ACORN as being "suspicious" before they were passed on with a designation of questionable to the election boards reviewing the applications.
In other words, all this talk about "voter fraud" doesn't amount to any real evidence because ACORN is notifying the election boards when a submitted application is questionable, and the election boards are rejecting those applications without registering any nonexistent, dead, misidentified, or otherwise illegal registrants.
There have been a few cases of illegal voting in the United States in the last ten years or so. In swing states, or local elections, it's conceivable that a party, a candidate, or another group could fund illegal voters to go the polls, claim to be someone else, and vote in the imaginary or illegally registered voter's name.
The chances of that happening are very slim with the new i.d. laws, though. Besides, if this were a widespread practice, the Bush Administration Department of Justice would have arrested the numerous perpetrators before they could affect an election's outcome. They've certainly been making a huge issue out of it.
But this hasn't happened.
On the contrary, the allegations and "reports" of voter fraud or attempted fraudulent registration vastly exceed the documented instances. In contrast, documented cases of voter suppression involving provisional ballots, purges of the voter rolls, day-long lines and a paucity of voting machines, not to mention intimidation and other shennanigans (the history of which has been thoroughly documented for generations -- ever since Americans first voted) have been flooding the courts and state bureaus of elections, especially since the computerized voting machines with the non-transparent, proprietary codes have been proliferated thanks to the Bush Administration's inaccurately named, Help America Vote Act.
No, what this screed attempting to link Obama, ACORN, and widespread "voter fraud" makes clear is that nothing has changed except the methods.
Those who would suppress the vote--as always--are resorting to every means necessary to limit the franchise in order to stay in power. If that doesn't work, as seems to be the case this election cycle, they will taint the election process itself with overwhelming but unsubstantiated claims of "fraud." This they hope will discredit the proponents of voting rights and the candidate who supports them.
The amount of money and effort required to coordinate and sustain a smear campaign of this magnitude against a democratic social movement and its agents--like ACORN--is indicative of just how helpless and apprehensive the anti-democratic aristocracy is feeling about the upcoming election.
But it is exactly a fair election that these people fear, not a fraudulent one. Most Americans now see that all these so-called "anti-fraudulent" HAVA protections are nothing more than thinly disguised attempts to repress the demos and thwart the democratic expression of the will of the American people.
Give up. It's not worth it. Instead of throwing mud and spraying poison at community organizers, put down your martinis and roll up your sleeves and join the human race.
We're moving forward. Together. Now.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(653 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
