Voter Oppression
The GOP manufactured voter fraud lie
2008-10-28
By Brian Gilmore

Now that we know the polls for the Presidential election are looking increasingly worse for John McCain of Arizona, those on the ground, working the streets of voter America, trying to get the vote out, and most importantly, the votes counted, expect a tsunami of voter challenges on Election Day. It is, as many have asserted, one way the Republicans can make it close. And the GOP is aware if they can make it close, they can win it. The bogus election of 2000 tells them so.

The latest evidence of the coming wave of GOP voter challenges that is percolating is the ACORN voter registration fraud scandal, or should I say, the scandal that isn’t really a scandal. ACORN (stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a well respected community organizing group that, for decades, has worked in poor and low income communities on a variety of issues, describes the manufactured scandal, as a pretext for a Republican attempt to jack the election through voter suppression.

“The thing that is not funny is that they are going to bring an army of challengers to polling places,” an ACORN official in North Carolina advised me.  The alleged voter registration fraud scandal (the McCain campaign also tried to link Barack Obama to the scandal) was implemented according to the same official to “divert attention away from …efforts to challenge legal voters.”

The weak allegations are well known. According to John McCain, ACORN is attempting to pull off “one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country” by deliberately registering fake voters and having these individuals vote in the election. These statements were repeated by McCain after reports emerged that voter registrations completed by ACORN hired workers were clearly not sustainable.

But, as is not reported to the public, ACORN did most of the reporting of these problems on their own to election officials because the organization is very experienced in voter registration campaigns and is aware that there are always a few unscrupulous, temporary workers who will try to cheat and still get paid.

The Christian Science Monitor reported, after the allegations raged for days, that ACORN “flagged 80 percent” of the questionable registrations themselves, fired the rogue workers who submitted the registrations immediately, and sent the faked registrations “separately” to election officials as required by law to alert them. This hardly sounds like an organization trying to stack the election. The New York Times called the allegations “wildly overblown.” The Miami Herald described the registration work as “sloppiness, but not fraud.”

As has been described repeatedly by ACORN, the organization hires workers to register voters in low and moderate income areas. Some of the workers didn’t register real people; they pulled names from phone books and from anywhere and submitted these registrations.

According to the North Carolina ACORN official I spoke with, the organization registered 1-2 million voters since 2004 and not a “single illegal vote was cast in that time” by an ACORN registered voter. Remember, the alleged fraud is voter registration not voting. There are no fraudulent votes to be found. The GOP never tells the public these unchallenged facts.

Yet, the real madness that lies beneath the smear campaign on ACORN is the set-up for a GOP orchestrated siege on polling booths on Election Day to stop legal votes from being counted. The Republicans have been accused of aggressive voter suppression tactics before and in this election, it appears it is the road to victory. Here is a brief summary of the program we might be in store for on Election Day and what is allegedly in motion right now:

• Using the threat of bench warrants to scare voters away from the polls;
• Using the threat of arrest for back child support owed to suppress votes;
• Purging voter rolls prior to Election day for a variety of reasons;
• Challenge any voter who has recently had mail returned from their listed address;
• Target poor and minority communities with these tactics and challenge as many voters as possible to force the voters to cast provisional ballots which are not likely to be counted.

Of course, there might be more to this power play. But all of it is being justified by exaggerating the alleged voter registration fraud of ACORN which does not exist.  It is, by all evidence, a pathetic diversionary tactic to off-set the poorly run campaign of John McCain, the sharply run campaign of Barack Obama, and most importantly, the issues at hand in the election that clearly call for an approach to solving the country’s problems in a manner that the Republicans have historically resisted. 

Thus, the message of this historic election has not changed. Get out and vote, insist upon exercising your right to vote, and if you are challenged on any grounds, seek out legal staff at the polling station (there will likely be someone at every site), and insist upon casting your vote like any other American.

Brian Gilmore is a public interest lawyer and a columnist with the Progressive Media Project in Washington, D.C.