It seems like the editorial departments of liberal newspapers across America are going out of their way to assure us that ACORN, which has been been submitting massive numbers of fraudulent "voter" registrations, is really doing nothing much to complain about. And if you do complain, you should shut up as the Los Angeles Times told John McCain or you are just playing politics as the Raleigh News & Observer asserted today in an editorial (emphasis mine):
The Associated Press reports that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is under investigation by the FBI for possible involvement in voter registration fraud. That follows Republican complaints that the group, which has signed up over a million new voters nationwide, including 27,000 in North Carolina, is abetting fraud by submitting false registration forms to election officials. Last week John McCain made the startling charge that ACORN may be "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history."
Startling charge? If this charge is so "startling" then why is the FBI currently investigating ACORN and raiding its offices in many of the battleground states?
...Fact is, verified instances of people intentionally casting ballots that they're not entitled to cast are vanishingly rare these days. And no wonder: the penalty (in a federal election) can be five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Not many people want to vote, or double-vote, quite that badly.
ACORN, for its part, asserts that no illegal vote has ever been tied to it -- and it submitted nearly 2 million registrations in 2004 and 2006. So is this an election issue or a political issue?
This is the latest shtick used by liberals defending ACORN registration fraud. Although they might be submitting thousands of fraudulent registrations, they don't translate into actual votes. As far as the aburd claim that voter fraud is "vanishingly rare these days," here is but one of many examples of such fraud reported by the New York Post:
Four well-heeled New York Democrats are under investigation by an Ohio prosecutor for setting up a temporary home in the swing state - where two have already cast their ballots - just so that their votes will be counted there, The Post has learned.
The targets of the probe - including the daughter and son-in-law of a New York City real-estate titan, a former New York Sun reporter and a Bank of New York Mellon executive - are connected to Vote From Home, a Manhattan-based political action committee set up to get voters to the polls in Ohio, where residents are allowed to cast ballots 29 days before Election Day, investigators said.
The News & Observer also use another popular line in defense of ACORN: They have been victimized by their own workers:
...ACORN's methods, which involve paying people to sign up new voters, do indeed bear seeds of trouble.
Hourly registration-drive workers looking to put in for extra time can be tempted to make up names, or submit the same name multiple times. Meanwhile, state laws require third-party registration drives to submit all the signature forms they gather to election authorities. (ACORN says it points out suspicious forms to election officials and promptly dismisses workers who cheat.)
One result is that there have been instances this year, in Connecticut, Indiana and Texas, in which a significant percentages of the registration forms turned in by ACORN appear faulty -- that is, faked. Another is that in recent election years a small number of the group's part-time workers or employees have been indicted, and some found guilty, of offenses linked to registration shenanigans. They get no sympathy here.
It was all the fault of those nasty workers who victimized innocent little ACORN who had absolutely no idea of the fraud they were perpetrating. Yeah, right! But that is the absurdity promoted by the N&O.
Stand by now for the "equivalence" argument which is also promoted in liberal circles. This is the assertion that Republican voter "suppression" is supposedly just as big a problem as ACORN fraud:
It's equally the case, however, that in recent years we've seen apparent efforts to deter presumably Democratic-leaning citizens from voting. These include misleading phone calls, excessive purging of voter rolls in advance of elections and efforts to snarl polling places by putting newly registered voters through the wringer. Right now in Ohio, ground zero on the election fraud/vote suppression front, Republicans are filing legal challenges that question the status of about 200,000 newly registered voters.
Presumably the FBI investigation will lead to the facts about ACORN's voter drives. Meantime, poll workers should do their jobs, preventing fraud. But some perspective is in order: if there's politics in ACORN's sign-ups, there's an equal amount in the noisy campaign against it. Americans are entitled to vote, and there's nothing wrong with helping qualified would-be voters to do so. Efforts to suppress turnout are as old, and as disreputable, as voter fraud.
Get that? Voter suppression, which is frequently alleged but never proved, is supposedly just as bad as the massive vote fraud being committed by ACORN. And if you complain about vote fraud then you're just playing politics. Oh, and a nice little touch there with that term, "election fraud/vote suppression" to make them seem like equal problems. Perhaps the News & Observer should trademark it and collect royalty payments when other liberal periodicals use it to defend the vote fraud antics of ACORN.
Try as the News & Observer does to defend ACORN, many of their readers don't buy their excuses as you can see in these comments:
Keep rolling on N&O. Your paper and obvious bias is a joke. Hopefully you will have to continue with your layoffs.
McClatchey is at it again, trying to spin for ACORN now. there were 2000 voter registrations in Gary Indiana with similar signatures, in Ohio one teenager was asked to register 73 times and a woman asked to register 112 times. ACORN has been convicted in the past as well in Washington state for voter registration fraud. This editorial is a sham. Everytime Acorn sends in a registration they get paid. It is corrupt and needs to be cleaned out. But of course the guilty will squeal innocence, it just so happens they are tied to Obama, even though Obama lies about it. Obama's campaign just recently paid them 800 thousand dollars. It is in the paper trail people.
