What’s the Real Story on Those &%$#@&$$! ACORN People?

Because I report on issues pertaining to LA’s inner city, I occasionally run into people from the suddenly infamous organization known as ACORN. In my case, I’d mostly see people from the LA office located in the 3600 block of Grand Ave. They always seemed like earnest folks.

For instance, I remember the day after one of the student race riots at Jefferson High School in the spring of 2005, a bunch of ACORN people tried to organize students into making a human “peace circle” around the outside of school. The only problem with the strategy was that the students weren’t really feeling all that peaceful yet, so the “peace circle” quickly degenerated into a fistfight.

But generally they seemed to do positive work in the community. They helped people to file their taxes, worked for better schools, and so on. Therefore it was surprising to find them at the center of what the McCain campaign is describing as a giant nationwide voter fraud conspiracy.

ACORN is also, according to some Republicans, a big part of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

In other words, it seems that the 40-year-old community organizing group is not only trying to steal a U.S. presidential election, it has also helped to bring about the near-collapse of the world’s economy.

Nationwide political domination and global fiscal ruination. Impressive.

(And, all by people whom I thought couldn’t pull off a simple high school peace circle. Silly me.)

But what, really, is the truth of the matter with ACORN?

In Nevada, and other states, ACORN is being investigated for the fact that some of their workers (who are usually poor, and are sometimes recently-released prison inmates. The horror!) have signed up piles of people who don’t exist. Never a good thing. (And not exactly an indication of good management. We understand the temptation for impoverished workers to scam. But that’s why one has job trainers and staff managers, to ride herd on such behavior.)

Plus ACORN has its own pesky internal problems to deal with:: For instance it is alleged that, a few years ago, the brother of the organization’s founder siphoned off a bunch of ACORN’s money—like, about a million dollars worth over several years time. Since ACORN operates on grants and donations, some of which is public money, this did not put anyone in a good mood.

The Washington Post has done a bit of reporting on the topic, in a story that appeared Tuesday, but unfortunately, while the story is assuredly worth reading, and sheds some light, the WaPo editors did not allocate enough investigative time or newsprint to settle the matter one way or the other.

At the moment, Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, has the most thoughtful and intelligent take on the issue of ACORN, which he characterizes as a calculated strategy on the part of the McCain campaign to try to plan ahead for future legal challenges to the presidential election should Barack Obama win on November 4.

Frankly, after reading a great deal on the issue, despite ACORN’s admitted imperfections, and vexing management issues, in the end, I agree with Josh Marshall.

Here are the important clips from his post:

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don’t remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I’m hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What’s key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people — often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN’s own efforts to catch errors. (It’s important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it’s ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of ‘thousands’ of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

Then Marshall quotes from Richard Hasen’s very precise and intelligent column written a year ago for the Dallas Morning News. Hason is a Loyola Law School prof who is an expert on election law and also runs the Election Law Blog.

At least in hindsight, the center’s line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.

But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee – thanks to the secret ballot – that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.

Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what – $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.

The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.

Now, once you finish reading about the Great ACORN World Domination Plot,take a look at this lovely case of voter caging that, thankfully, just got shot down by Federal Judge in Missouri.

This is the real voter fraud to worry about, people, actual voter disenfranchisement—-not whether or not Mickey Mouse or the entire starting lineup of the Raiders plus every person in the Dodgers’ outfield got falsely registered, or whether one guy signed a bunch of phony registration forms. Nobody’s going to let Mickey Mouse et al falsely vote. The registration fraud, is just that. Registration fraud—on the part of low-income registration workers trying to scam for money. And it should be punished.

But, despite much trying, nobody seems to be able to find examples of where it translated substantively into votes. And that’s the point.