LIBERADIO(!)

One of the four statements in the title of this post is not like the others in that it is, you know, true.

ACORN. You thought they were a community-based organization of 400,000 families in neighborhoods across the country fighting for the rights of the oppressed and powerless. You thought they were empowering citizens by registering over 1.3 million low-income, minority, and young voters in a total of 21 states. You thought they have been fighting for years against predatory lending practices.

Ha! Suckers! Thank goodness this year you have the Republicans and their leaders like John McCain and Sarah Palin to enlighten you, like past Republican leaders have enlightened you about ACORN in 2004 and 2006. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that every two years – election years, by golly – these accusations surface against a group that kicks ass in registering “low-income and minority voters” who traditionally are disenfranchised and tend to vote for one particular party.

From ACORN President Maude Hurd, “If John McCain thinks that community organizers caused the foreclosure crisis, he knows even less about the economy than previously thought”:

In his newest ad, John McCain’s campaign bizarrely claims that ‘ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, ACORN has worked successfully to help working class families get good home loans on fair terms from legitimate banks and has fought vigorously against predatory lenders who have ripped off families in our communities. These predatory loans caused the crisis.

“For more than a decade, ACORN members have held protests, released reports, and advocated for regulations to protect homeowners from predatory lenders. ACORN organizers and volunteers have been working day and night to help victims of the GOP economic meltdown to save their homes from foreclosure. In fact, ACORN has brought class action lawsuits against several predatory lenders, and has lobbied the Federal Reserve and Congress in support of regulations against predatory lending. ACORN has even been successful in convincing many lenders to treat homeowners more fairly and help families be able to make their mortgage payments and save their homes.

From ACORN’s Bertha Lewis and Steve Kest: The Truth About ACORN’s Voter Registration Drive

As The Nation pointed out recently, ACORN’s success in registering millions of low-income and minority voters has made it “something of a right-wing bogeyman.” Though ACORN believes that the right to vote is not, and should never be, a partisan issue, attacks from groups threatened by our historic success continue to come, motivated by partisan politics and often perpetuated by the media without full investigation of the facts. As a result, there have been a few recent stories about investigations of former ACORN workers for turning in incomplete, erroneous, or fraudulent voter registration applications. Predictably, partisan forces have tried to use these isolated incidents to incite fear of the “bogeyman” of “widespread voter fraud.” But we want to take this opportunity to set the record straight and tell you a few facts to show how these incidents really exemplify everything that ACORN is doing right:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field, but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card, so there is NO incentive for them to falsify cards. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the relatively rare cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

Fact: No charges have ever been brought against ACORN itself. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes.

Fact: Voter fraud by individuals is extremely rare, and incredibly difficult. There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work.

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN’s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered and allowed to vote, so there is also NO incentive to “disrupt the system” with phony cards.

Fact: Similar accusations were made, and attacks launched, against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. These attacks were not only groundless, they have since been exposed as part of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal and revealed to be part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression.

In 2004 and 2006, ACORN and other voter registration organizations were also accused of encouraging false voter registrations. When it finally came out in Congressional hearings that ACORN was indeed the victim of fraud and not the perpetrator of “voter fraud” (which doesn’t exist), several State Attorneys General, including New Mexico’s David Iglesias, had been illegally fired and their boss, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was forced to resign. Why was Iglesias fired? Because he refused to prosecute baseless charges of “voter fraud” in a partisan attempt at systematic voter suppression.

As they were in past election years, these attempts at voter suppression are part of a “full court press” against the country’s electorate – more specifically, the more easily disenfranchised. Add these attacks against ACORN to massive illegal voter roll purging (including, in a BBC expose featuring Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy, Jr., three million voters who have been disappeared by a GOP campaign draining voter rolls of the victims of the economic collapse), other forms of obfuscation and intimidation like the anonymous flier circulating in African-American neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia that states “that voters who are facing outstanding arrest warrants or who have unpaid traffic tickets may be arrested at the polls on Election Day,” still unsolved issues with paperless voting, and completely transparent and bogus partisan challenges to legitimately registered voters, and the game is over.