The Endless Cycle of Bullshit That Works: ACORN, Voter Fraud, and The Myth of Democracy

So this started out a long time ago. I was going to talk about ACORN, which I'm sure most of you have heard about by now, but I got lost reading every time I tried. For those who don't know, ACORN is a community organizing group. "ACORN's priorities have included: better housing and wages for the poor, more community development investment from banks and governments, and better public schools. ACORN pursues these goals through demonstration, negotiation, legislation, and voter participation." Among many other things, they also do voter registration drives for the Democratic party and are setting records in new registrations for this election. The issue from the Republican perspective is best explained in this article. Basically:
-The group's voter-registration fraud is rampant, and authorities plan a nationwide sweep of ACORN offices to collect records.
-There have been 218,749 newly registered Democrats in North Carolina since January — more than five times the 38,337 new Republicans, state records show.
-Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report.
-Obama worked as executive director of ACORN's voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992.

The answer to these accusations were explained simply in a press release from ACORN. I can't just point a few things out because it is all relevant. This completely debunks the concept that they are committing voter fraud at all, if not just the fact that they are required by law to turn in every registration form they receive. Colbert calls it fantasy land.



This is nothing new, what else can we expect from the Republican Party? Today an an article appeared that was somewhat disturbing. G.W. has decided to pursue the issue in Ohio and ordered the Department of Justice to investigate. This article also outlines the problem with electronic voting machines. As we already know, Diebold is quite the suspicious bearer of electronic voting machine contracts in Ohio (if you have never seen this, give it a look).





Voters are being suppressed in the increased screening involved with these investigations. This article in the New York Times explains how.

"Some states allow such [challenged] voters to cast provisional ballots. But they are often not counted because they require added verification.

States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.

Under federal law, election officials are supposed to use the Social Security database to check a registration application only as a last resort, if no record of the applicant is found on state databases, like those for driver’s licenses or identification cards.

The requirement exists because using the federal database is less reliable than the state lists, and is more likely to incorrectly flag applications as invalid. Many state officials seem to be using the Social Security lists first."

So how can we possibly think that we live in a democratic system when the election is determined by who is better at stealing it? This is no democracy. We live in an aristocracy. There are even more examples of the election being stolen below. What we have here in a nutshell is a community organization under attack by the Republican Party for following the law, while the Republicans heighten the issue by launching investigations that disenfranchises more voters than it catches. Though there is no evidence that this type of voter fraud occurs, as shown by the argument against the Indiana voter I.D. law, the Republican echo chamber maintains this as an issue. They are removing tons of new voters who have minor inconsistancies on their registration. On top of that, they are challenging the people whose homes have been foreclosed as shown in an entry below. They also do this to scare people in to voting for them by focusing on ACORN's loose affiliation with Barack Obama (same thing as the Bill Ayers deal, which speaking of, check out what Palin said).

How do you win an election? Just remove the difference from the competition.