A former ACORN communications coordinator from 2000 to 2003, David Swanson rebuts the "absolutely fraudulent and nationally coordinated attacks... currently all over the news" for American Chronicle readers (10/10/08)

In fact, the accusations against ACORN are not about voting, but about voter registration. Now, if some kid fills out bogus forms in order to make more money from ACORN for supposedly registering voters, ACORN is supposed to try to catch that stuff and not turn in those forms. On the whole, ACORN has registered huge numbers of people with only a tiny percentage of problems. But the more important point is that the kid trying to scam extra bucks has no intention of trying to vote multiple times, risking imprisonment, and no intention of bringing in corpses to have them vote, as CNN seems to imagine. There's no money in fraudulent voting, only enormous risk. But there is money and power in vote suppression and vote miscounting, the major stories that this one is meant to distract from.

Actually, according to ACORN, the group is required by law to turn in all the registration forms they receive, questionable or not--which is a sensible rule, preventing politically motivated registration drives from tossing out forms with the "wrong" party identification. " In nearly every case that has been reported," the community group says, "it was ACORN that discovered the bad forms, and called them to the attention of election authorities, putting the forms in a package that identified them in writing as suspicious, encouraging election officials to investigate, and offering to help with prosecutions."

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Election, Media Criticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.