Friday, October 24, 2008
Registration politics
ACORN has apparently lied -- at least in the "Bush lied, people died" meaning of the word -- about the numbers of new voters it has registered. Forget those 1.3 million new voters; the truth is roughly 1/3 [typo fixed] that number. And this according to the New York Times.
Community organizers, apparently, are as prone to lying as politicians. There's something to remember in that.
CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.
7 Comments:
By 
clint, at
Fri Oct 24, 06:56:00 PM:
Question: Does the new number (450,000) include the 200,000 voter registrations in Ohio that do not match DMV and Social Security records?
If so, it might be more accurate to say that 450,000 of their fraudulent registrations were in states like Ohio where the state government is working hard to obscure the fraud.
By 
, at
Fri Oct 24, 06:58:00 PM:
450,000/1,300,000= .35 that number.
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Oct 24, 06:59:00 PM:
You know... this election and the various dirty, corrupt shenanigans within it have made me a fan of a national ID card system.
No card, no vote. When you vote, flag your name, sign a receipt. Can't vote on a flagged name, and signed receipt guarantees that the vote was cast.
Sound reasonable?
By , at
Fri Oct 24, 08:20:00 PM:
Could we use the card to identify illegal immigrants?
By , at
Sat Oct 25, 12:59:00 PM:
GOP Attacks ACORN, Wildly Exaggerates Obama Connection
The Race:
Barack Obama (D) vs. John McCain (R): President of the U.S.
Discuss and Debunk
The Smear:
Playing to racial fears and demonizing low-income Americans, the right wing media and the McCain campaign are attacking the community organization ACORN and going into contortions in attempts to tie it to Barack Obama.
The Truth:
Barack Obama has worked with a wide variety of groups and individuals to empower the people of his local community. Here are the facts about Obama’s work with ACORN, a group that fights for the rights and well being of low-income Americans.
First, over a period of three years in the mid-1990s, he talked to members of ACORN about community organizing for all of two hours, for which he was not paid.
In 1992, he helped a coalition of groups called Project Vote to register voters in Chicago, and ACORN was one group among many involved in the initiative (ACORN took a bigger role in Project Vote years later, long after Obama had moved on).
Finally, the law firm to which Obama belonged represented many groups in a voting rights lawsuit, which included ACORN and several other such sketchy groups as the U.S. Department of Justice and the League of Women Voters.
Recently, ACORN wound up in the news because of some irregularities with its voter registration operation, which ACORN reported to state officials entirely of its own volition. For an explanation of these – and why they aren’t examples of “voting fraud” – you can read this piece in the Politico: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1008/Two_kinds_of_fraud.html
But, most importantly, none of it has anything to do whatsoever with Barack Obama. But the McCain campaign and Republican fear-mongers are hoping to do some insidious things with their smears. Because minority and low-income voters tend to vote against Republicans, they have a vested interest in tarnishing any registration efforts by raising the oft-debunked specter of voter fraud. They also hope to scare voters with absurd images of poor minorities somehow “gaming the system” to their advantage, and then go to ridiculous lengths to tie it all to Obama. The attacks on ACORN generally take genuine, minor issues and blow them up to an outlandish degree, and then they use that to feed the smears about Obama’s tangential ties to the group.
The McCain campaign is going to do everything it can to create ugly distractions before this election is over, because they have nothing to say about the real issues that matter to you. You can help stop them by spreading the truth.
By , at
Sat Oct 25, 05:07:00 PM:
We got a DKOS troll spouting Fight the Smears (oxymoron) propaganda.
The ties between ACORN and OBAMA (the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree) are longstanding and continuous and continued well into this Presidential campaign. The website conveniently ignores the nearly 900,000 that Obama's campaign spent on ACORN voter drives during the primaries. It also ignores the video of OBAMA at the December 2007 (on youtube) ACORN Community Organizers Conference where OBAMA stated that these COs (ACORN) would be on his TRANSITION TEAM, when Obama was elected and would steer his 100 days agenda (and their legislative wishes would be included in his first 100 days legislation). Too many smoking guns for that troll to refute. Too much koolaid and other illicit substances too.
By , at
Sat Oct 25, 06:49:00 PM:
Distractions? As if.
My bet is that the "new" number is the count of legitimate registrations, while the old number includes fraudulent registrations. Releasing the new number is their way of obscuring their illegal activities.
