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This story is 99% hype, exaggeration and outright lies. The truthiest 1% is because a few employees violate ACORNS strict policies against submitting anything but totally legitimate registrations. Believe me, ACORN staff has been VERY concerned (for at least 4 years now) that some employees may be tempted to pad their number of registrations, because in order to stay employed there long term, voter reg workers needed to average a certain number of registrations per day, or face being let go. This admittedly does put some pressure on workers, which makes sense from ACORN's standpoint in terms of having standards for the performance of their workers, but it also increased the temptation to "cheat" and make up a few bogus reg cards to pad their numbers.
And speaking of numbers, the number of new voters registered by ACORN in '04 was 1.3 MILLION, and I have a suspicion it's WAY more for this election. So let's put this in perspective in terms of the total contribution ACORN makes to registering Democrats, Republicans, Independents, whatever party; as compared to a tiny percent that slipped through the cracks and into the hands of some corrupt ReThuglican hack who doesn't mind using their employment as an Elections Officer to stir this kind of shit-storm up ... rather than elections officials exposing the very intentional and very conspiratorial election fraud by the GOP. It's just one more distraction, cuz that's all they got.
The other thing to consider here, is that the ONLY "damage done", if any, was a little inconvenience to the Elections Officials having to go over questionable registrations with ACORN (ACORN flags registration forms they consider suspicious for any reason, and makes every effort to work with elections officials in the spirit of WANTING clean & fair elections). Also by state laws ACORN MUST submit EVERY registration card and not filter them out themselves. Such laws exist so ACORN (or any such group) won't be tempted, for example, to trash all the Republican registrations as "suspicious", but not the Dems. Bottom line: think about it ... bogus names & addresses to make a quota don't actually ever vote. These are merely bogus names and addresses with NO actual PERSON attached to them, much less a person "conspiring" to cast a bogus vote.. NO one is going to try to show up on election day and actually vote at all. Impact on election outcome = ZERO.
This whole "conspiracy" thing is laughable on its face. It's a twisted fantasy, and a total distortion of what's actually going on here. There is nothing "conspiratorial" here by ACORN to submit bogus registrations with an intent to use them on election day. In fact, if/when ACORN discovers an employee doing this, they are not only fired ON THE SPOT, and are reminded they have committed a felony, subject to prosecution, and ACORN will have NO part of it ... i.e. zero tolerance baby.
Now, compare the above so called "voter fraud" scenario with what the ReThuglicans have been up to, not just stealing the '00 and '04 elections with e-voting machines and systematic massive voter suppression in Ohio by Ken Blackwell and elsewhere in 04 (and these crimes have been well documented by John Conyers' Judiciary committee reports); but also now this year the Rethuglican "voter caging" operations that are going on in key states (well, at least where they've got ReThuglican Governors or Sec. of States who will play ball, directly effecting MILLIONS of Democratic voters being purged, most for specious reasons. This kind of fraud CLEARLY DOES IMPACT the outcome of elections and is indeed a felonious criminal conspiracy.
This is CLASSIC RW-neocon Rovian politics: do the most criminal things imaginable, and then accuse your political "enemies" of doing that very same thing, and justify the accusation with some sorry-ass shreds of "evidence" along with 99% lies peddled as 100% true 24/7 on what passes for "news" on TV, etc.
And sadly, yes .. there are Sheeple out there who will buy this crap, eps. but I sincerely hope you are not one of them.
I'm not taking this thing lightly at all; and so wanted to at least set the record straight from my experience with ACORN and as a voter who's been alarmed and vocal about the need for election integrity ever since the 00 SCOTUS coup for Bush/Cheney.
PS - This ACORN thing has got me hopping mad, and I'll probably be top posting a more expanded version of this later today.
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