ACORN

Just a few quick hits for your Sunday morning:

• Head on over to Congress Matters, a Daily Kos spinoff, to watch Sen. Durbin eviscerate Sen. David Vitter's (R-LA) anti-ACORN amendment. Or, just watch it here:

• The economy's been tough on Millennials, but we keep moving forward, especially by networking and communicating using online tools.
• Just in case you haven't read it yet, Eric Greenberg had a piece up on The Huffington Post a little over a week ago on Millennials, "post-partisanship," and President Obama.
• Andy Card, a former Chief of Staff in the tight-ass Bush administration, wants to lay out Obama and Co.'s clothes each night for work in the White House the next day. Has anyone told Card that he resigned his Chief of Staff position on March 28, 2006? Or that Bush is no longer in office?
• Campus Progress interviewed new Alaska senator Mark Begich (D). Here it is.
• Just in case you missed Sarah's post yesterday, the Pew Research Center examined online behavior by generation. Here is a link to the overview of the findings.

• The New York Times reports that 6,400 voters in Colorado may be disenfrachised thanks to dishonest trainings and misinformation distributed by the Republican Secretary of State's office. Our friends at New Era Colorado are featured prominently in the piece fighting back against the disenfranchisement.
• The Obama campaign raked in the cash in September, pulling in more than $150 million. If you missed it, campaign manager David Plouffe noted that Students were one of the top donors to the campaign, along with retirees.
• For some reason, I've never seen this before. Check out YDA's Young Voter Revolution. Take the pledge and check out the tools and resources.
• The Wall Street Journal business and technology blog looks at some data from Rapleaf and says that different swing states favor different social networks. For instance, Wisconsin youth favor Bebo, while Virginians favor Black Planet and New Mexican youth are on Hi5. This bears more looking into.
• The National Review commissioned a hit piece on Campus Progress. Over at Pushback, Jesse Singal ably rips NR's piece to shreds.
• Zack has an awesome idea to make FaceBook an even greater peer pressure machine to encourage voter turnout and political discussion.
• Skaters in Wasilla fought Sarah Palin and won.
• The LA Times has a rundown on celebrity PSA campaigns.
• Meanwhile, Visible Measures tries to measure the impact of those viral videos to Get Out the Vote. The site looks at which of 4 major GOTV PSAs has the most views, and finds that Leo DiCaprio's celebrity-studded "Don't Vote" video comes out on top.
• The Hill looks at the campaign's presence online and finds Obama ahead, but McCain catching up.
• Are your parents pestering you about ACORN and "voter fraud?" Send them this article from the election law blog.
• Mashable! tries to show a correlation between online activity on FaceBook and offline events in swing states, but doesn't do that convincing a job of it.
• In The Nation, Cora Courrier asks if youth will finally swing the election.
• Finally, a little music to start your day:

Oh what a difference some perspective makes. Ben Smith, bless him, has a great picture on Politico this great picture

And includes these little tid-bits

"The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida.

The immigration event, which other photos show was packed with red-shirted Acorn member, was co-sponsored by the local Catholic Archdiocese, the SEIU, and other groups.

McCain, still spiting much of his party on immigration at the time, was the headliner.

Bertha Lewis, Acorn's chief organizer, said in a statement that came with the photo, “It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans."

”We are sure that the extremists he is trying to get into a froth will be even more excited to learn that John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with ACORN, at an ACORN co-sponsored event, to promote immigration reform," she said."

Then there is this:

Matthew Segal from SAVE sent me this video of a debate that his organization the Student Association for Voter Empowerment had with the College Republicans three months ago. In the debate, Segal remembered that the GOP was attacking ACORN spreading the same misinformation they are today. As you can see in the short clip the allegations are thrown out there, and Segal corrects the record for what ACORN really does.

The conservative republican blog Political Party Poop (despite not being able to come up with a polite name for their blog) is attacking me for my account of the truth behind the attacks against ACORN in swing states across the country.

Interestingly the site does not refute any of the accusations and clearifications on election laws that I present in my argument. Instead it continues to call me names and point fingers at ACORN.

Much like the leader of their party, the law and the facts are inconsequential.

New evidence that this is a partisan ploy to disenfranchise thousands of voters in swing states is surfacing every few hours. Notably, this piece which talks about the Ohio Sheriff I mentioned in yesterday's post. The Sheriff has now been told that he is not allowed to follow students and ask them about their voter registration. Seems this is "unlawful intimidation" which is protected under the Voting Rights Act and National Voter Registration Act.

"Fischer, a Republican, told reporters in Ohio that he was launching an investigation into concerns about college students who took advantage of a week-long window in Ohio this fall where they could register to vote and then submit an in-person absentee ballot."

MSNBC reported on this but neglected to mention election laws and ACORN following them.... The piece quotes Doug Lewis, the executive director of the nonpartisan National Association of Election Officials who "testified before the House Judiciary Committee last month."

“This unfettered, unbounded, unregulated use of third-party registrations, where they sit on those registrations right until the end and try to turn them all in at the very last minute — it just screws up the system,” Lewis told the committee. “It disenfranchises voters. It's one of those things that just is frustrating to us as elections officials.”

Lewis added that in his years as an election official he has seen both Democrats and Republicans “dumping in” new voter registration cards at the last minute before a state’s voter registration deadline. “The problem is that these groups all think that they're going to surprise the other campaign with how many people they've registered.”

One should note that the National Association of Election Officials is an unfettered, unbound, unregulated, third party organization. If you read Mr. Lewis's testimony from 2007 (pdf) before the Senate Committee you'll find further need for concern. Mr. Lewis believes that election laws should never be the concern of the federal government because states have so many different laws and as such, regulations should be left up to Election Officials to handle. No disrespect to Mr. Lewis, but we've tried that... it doesn't seem to be working. It also wouldn't allow for regulation of people who believe that 3rd party voter registration is a bad idea.

Now, if we just had universal voter registration, that would certainly solve everything. Can we get the GOP on record of supporting this in efforts to avoid fraud?

To see the whole story on this see previous blog here

Friday Night on Larry King both conservatives Joe "Pags" Pagliarulo and Jonah Goldberg say that ACORN is lying about their actions in registering voters.

Once again - ACORN is required by law to turn in every voter registration form. They flag the ones they believe are not real or accurate, and ACORN stated before this video was cut that they went so far as to communicate to these BOE's what was going on.

The ACORN spokesperson also said that every two weeks ACORN turns in voter registration forms, so the fact that these folks are just now coming out with there being "problems" is suspect because the most recent registration documents are only the last two weeks - so how is it that they have such HUGE stacks of people from way back when that they are only NOW beginning to talk about?

UPDATE: Now John McCain's campaign is attacking Obama for being associated with ACORN

UPDATE II: Please also see Friday night's Larry King, I'm working on getting the actual statement ACORN gave in the interview, but here's the post, spin. Stephanie is right on the money.

All day the mainstream news has been reporting the so-called Voter Fraud on the part of ACORN that has registered over 1.2 million people to vote in low income areas of the country.

THE FACTS: - all people who do voter registration are REQUIRED BY LAW to turn in the forms that they receive, whether they are valid or not.

What ACORN does when they register someone to vote is then turn around and verify that the person is who they say they are. When the person can't be found ACORN then flags them as suspicious. When they turn them into boards of elections (which again they are require to do) those suspicious ones are flagged so BOE's can deal with them accordingly.

Where the controversy comes in is that this is all a grand voter suppression tactic being used to scare those same low income voters that have been registered by ACORN from voting because they think that their registration might not be valid. If you notice... these are being contested in very close swing states as part of a Republican ploy to slow down the process and scare low income voters.

The Facts: If Donald Duck did in fact register to vote - and by some miracle showed up on the voter rolls, the only way he would be able to vote as a newly registered voter is by showing up on election day and showing valid ID to verify he is who he say he is and lives at the address he lives at. Conducting this kind of "fraud" on a large scale would be impossible.

In Ohio the county is a rich republican leaning county where it is Republicans who are the ones raising the issue

"Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer and representatives of County Prosecutor Stephen Haller have contacted the local Board of Elections asking for the voter registration cards of everyone who voted during the six-day window, which ended Monday.

Haller is the former law partner of Mike DeWine, the former Republican senator who is chairing presidential nominee John McCain's Ohio campaign." The AP Reports

Here is a video from Fox News today where McCain is trying to scare voters

As with Ohio, the raid on Missouri was also a scam. Read up on the election protection site BradBlog who quotes the ACORN midwest director

"It's par for the course," [Ordower] said. "When you're doing more registrations than anyone else in the country, some don't want low-income people being empowered to vote. There are pretty targeted attacks on us, but we're proud to be out there doing the patriotic thing getting people registered to vote."

Republicans are among ACORN's loudest critics. At a campaign stop in Bethlehem, Pa., supporters of John McCain interrupted his remarks Wednesday by shouting, "No more ACORN."

PLEASE GET THE FACTS STRAIGHT!

ACORN verifies every single registration form, and when they can't, they flag them as potentially fraudulent before turning them into officials, as they are required by law!

Progress Illinois debunks the CNN Report here

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

"I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone." - Allen Raymond, former GOP operative

Voter fraud by individuals has been a major partisan debate in recent elections, inspiring multiple states to consider or pass laws that purport to stop it, including "no-match, no-vote" list maintenance procedures and strict voter ID  requirements. Despite federal findings that the act of casting an illegal ballot is exceedingly rare, partisans often cite large scale voter registration drives as voter fraud culprits, and perpetuate the myth of voter fraud by spreading the fear that such votes cancel out legitimate ones. With rising registration rates - particularly among historically underrepresented Americans - it is no surprise that partisans are spreading this myth, and the media often perpetuates the hysteria by printing stories on the small numbers of bad registration cards submitted by large scale voter registration drives (including the 1.2 million submitted by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN).

Despite the constant trickle of "voter fraud" scares in the media, however, it is becoming more evident that elections are more often compromised by systematic efforts to suppress eligible voters, including the very measures that are meant to protect against the extremely rare instances of ineligible voters attempting to cast a ballot. The real enemy to fair elections are organized voter suppression efforts that are seen in these poorly devised election laws, partisan dirty tricks, and systematic partisan efforts to challenge legitimate voters. From the alleged plan to challenge foreclosure victims in Michigan and Ohio to the potential "no-match, no-vote" fiascoes in Wisconsin and Florida, many Americans have cause to wonder, "will my vote count in November?"

On Monday, September 22, KCRW's To the Point host, Warren Olney, discussed voter fraud and voter suppression in the 2008 presidential election with Project Vote Executive Director Michael Slater, Doug Chapin of the Pew Center, former GOP strategist Allen Raymond, and Wall Street Journal columnist, John Fund.

In "major states like Ohio, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania" this year, Slater warned that we can expect some "election administration problems," which run the gamut from logistical issues, such as poorly distributed voting machines, to voter suppression tactics, including voter caging, which historically affect low income and minority communities. These communities, which have historically been systematically shut out of the electoral process, have shown signs of increased political interest and higher registration rates they year, prompting fears of increased partisan efforts to suppress this tidal wave of new voters.

Fund repeated stories of small numbers of allegedly invalid voter registration cards being submitted out of the more than 1.2 million turned in this year by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN, and said "some of these voter registration efforts have been questionable." But former GOP operative Allen Raymond, explained that there was a critical difference between a "systematic" voter suppression program "versus one that is part of the process." For one, he said, systematic efforts, like voter caging, are far more detrimental to election integrity than voter registration drive employees submitting bad applications.

Raymond was dismissive of the allegations against voter registration drives.

"Look, those are a couple of people who are just trying to earn a buck, collecting signatures. I've seen it all the time on ballot access petition efforts," he said of the voter registration fraud allegations. "I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone...and so I think what you really need to address are those systematic efforts," said Raymond.

Election Dirty Tricks

Raymond knows all about partisan use of systemic voter suppression efforts; he has written a book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, which describes his years as a dirty-tricks specialist for the GOP. Raymond served time for a 2002 Republican phone jamming scheme. In a September 15 interview with the Michigan Messenger Raymond said "holding down Democratic turnout is a key part of Republican strategy for victory in November." Asked about reports of Republican attempts to challenge the voting rights of foreclosure victims, Raymond said that if he were still in the dirty-tricks business he "would be doing that all day long."

Other stories that have surfaced in recent weeks contribute to fears that partisans are ramping up their voter suppression machines. Last week, a mailer from the Republican National Committee that went to multiple registered Democrats in Florida left many confused about their party affiliation, according to Pam Fessler of NPR. While some Democratic officials consider the mailer an attempt to challenge voters based on returned mail, particularly Democratic senior citizens, Republican officials claim the confusion was not intentional and denied allegations of voter caging, according to the Naples Daily News on Sunday.

But in recent weeks several media and Internet outlets, including Air America, have reported on accounts of massive mailings of absentee ballots from the McCain campaign sent to registered Democrats and Obama supporters in other battleground states as well, including  Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; many of the mailings appear to contain the wrong preprinted return addresses for ballots, which would direct them to the wrong precinct.

Of even greater concern than dirty tricks is the possibility of voter suppression through election administration problems that are expected to run the gamut in key states.

No-Match, No-Vote

Voter advocates claim thousands of Wisconsin voters may "lose their right to vote" as a result of a lawsuit filed by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen just six weeks before the election.  Hollen, who sued the Government Accountability Board - which oversees elections in the state -  to "seek an order requiring the board to compare voter information to the Department of Transportation records for more voters," is being scrutinized for his ties to the McCain campaign (he is the campaign's co-chair in Wisconsin), according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Hollen hopes to quickly implement a notoriously faulty voter list maintenance system known as "no-match, no-vote," which experts say could result in purging eligible voters from the Wisconsin registration rolls. This system was found to incorrectly fail 22 percent of voters during an initial test in August (additionally, four out of six judges on the G.A.B. also failed to match the system). Under "no-match, no-vote", voters could mistakenly lose their registration as a result of "transposed digits, variations in names ("Becky" instead of "Rebecca," for instance) or poor handwriting on voter registration forms," the Journal-Sentinel reports. "Apt to fail are people with apostrophes, hyphens or spaces in their names. Voter records usually drop punctuation and spaces - 'ONeil' instead of 'O'Neil' - while driver's license records often keep them."

A similar practice is being enforced in Florida that could "turn Election Day 2008 in Florida into a catastrophe akin to the hanging-chads debacle of 2000," Florida Today editorialized this week. "With no time for troubleshooting the system, that could falsely disenfranchise many who've done nothing wrong." The state's dormant  2005 "no-match, no-vote" law was revived by Republican Secretary of State Kurt Browning in early September after challenges failed in court. Browning's decision to enforce this practice caused a critical uproar from voting rights activists, who claim such a move could disenfranchise thousands of Floridians, according to a Miami Herald report earlier this month.

"No-match, no-vote laws" are sold to the public as a way to prevent fraudulent voting, but as Florida Today correctly notes; "few people try to vote under someone else's name. A five-year hunt for voter fraud by the Justice Department under the Bush administration found almost no evidence of organized efforts to tilt national elections."

The Elections Supervisor of Leon County, Florida, Ion Sancho, is quoted in the Florida Today piece as saying that the real problem is not potential fraud by voters but partisan manipulation of the process. Sancho has been vocal about his opposition to the Florida laws he is required to enforce, including how the state makes eligible voters vulnerable to partisan challenges. Speaking on WGCU radio in Florida on September 12, Sancho told host Sasha Rethati that in the past ten years the Florida legislature had written rules to "make sure that the party in power could stay in power." He pointed to a 2005 Florida law that stripped the state's voters of the right to contest challenges at the polls, and how challengers now only needed to express a "good faith belief" that a voter is ineligible to force the voter to file a provisional ballot. "You can supply a list containing 10,000 names to the supervisor of elections," said Sancho, "and I have to make all 10,000 members vote by provisional ballot."

"What we have here is partisans attempting to use anything they can possibly find to gain an advantage on the other party," said Sancho. "Quite frankly, I'm fed up with it as an election official. The reason I came into this field was to make sure Americans had the right to vote, and to have their votes counted properly."



Quick Links:

Minnite, Lorraine. The Politics of Voter Fraud. Project Vote. March 2007.



In Other News:

Same-day voter signup getting serious look - Decatur Herald-Review [Ill.]

...Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, is investigating moving to same-day voter registration in two years. That means a person who was eligible to register but had not done so could walk into a polling place on Election Day, register to vote and be handed a ballot...

GOP: Lose Your Home, Lose Your Vote - The Nation

Senator John McCain was a foot soldier in the deregulation revolution, which triggered the current banking crisis and the wave of foreclosures. In Michigan, his party wants to deny the right to vote to victims of the GOP's misguided economic policies and the sleazy banking practices they encouraged.

Oklahoma election officials disagree with ACLU - Associated Press

State law prohibits former felons from registering to vote until the full length of their prescribed sentence has expired - even if they are not in prison and are no longer supervised by the Department of Corrections, the secretary of the state Election Board said Monday.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote's Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

Bumped. -Craig

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog Voting Matters

By Nathan Henderson-James

Just yesterday we noted the right way to report on charges of voter fraud and the wrong way to go about it. We explained how the news media had been gamed by people with a partisan interest in the outcome of elections to gin up hysteria to engage in voter intimidation and voter disenfranchisement efforts.

Well, the partisans are back at it in Wisconsin, but this time the press is following the lead of Virginia journalists and scrutinizing the claims rather than simply reprinting the press release.

Here’s the backstory. The community organization ACORN has recently completed a voter registration drive in Milwaukee aimed at historically disenfranchised populations like low-income folks and African-Americans. The drive assisted voters complete some 35,000 cards. So far so good.

However, some of ACORN’s canvassers were caught forging cards in order to get paid for not doing the work. Under Wisconsin law all cards filled out, completely or incompletely, fraudulently or not, are required to be turned in. Out of the 35,000 cards, ACORN and Board of Elections officials estimate that about 1500-2000 of them had problems. The bulk of those were simple incompletes, but about 200 or so were clearly attempts by canvassers to defraud both ACORN and the state of Wisconsin by submitting false cards.

The traditional media has actually done a fairly good job reporting the story, going into great detail on how the cards were caught, the quality control procedures used by ACORN, and the context of the numbers involved versus the total number of cards submitted. This reportage has been ably supplemented by bloggers like Cory Liebmann at One Wisconsin Now and Capper at Cognitive Dissonance.

But, of course, this situation has served as an opportunity for conservative partisans to immediately pick up their calls for voter disenfranchisement policies such as voter ID. Such a policy would ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, actually push down the voter participation rates among those folks who most rely on voter registration drives to bring them into the civic participation process.

Here’s choice quote from Pete DiGaudio who writes as The Texas Hold ‘Em Blogger,

“Well, yes, I actually do support voter suppression. I am in favor of suppressing the vote of dead people, nonexistent people, convicted felons, illegal aliens, people voting more than once, et al. Every time one of these people votes, it cancels out my legitimate vote.

A simple thing like photo ID for voting would eliminate these fraudulent voters when they showed up at the polls.”

Project Vote’s report The Politics of Voter Fraud (PDF) has consistently pointed out that there simply isn’t widespread voter fraud in the United States and any fraudulent voting has never been tied to voter registration fraud, which is what has partisans so breathless and hyperbolic.

But the rush to point to a solution like voter ID seems not to be bothered by facts. Like the fact that the so-called fraud every partisan points to is always centered on voter registration cards. Well, voter ID isn’t going to stop canvassers from wanting to get paid for not doing the work and it isn’t going to stop states like Wisconsin from requiring that every card be turned in regardless of its accuracy, completeness, or legitimacy and it’s definitely not going to help elections officials catch bad cards.

The truth is that the laws as written and enforced catch such problems. The mere fact of this story in the media means the system in Milwaukee works the way it is supposed to, catching problem cards. Voter ID, on the other hand stops something called “voter impersonation”, which just doesn’t happen in the Untied States. Of the 24 convictions won by the US Department of Justice between 2002 and 2005 for voter fraud, most of them were for problems with submitting false or illegal absentee ballots. Voter ID laws do nothing to fix this problem. But what they are great at is stopping otherwise eligible voters from casting ballots.

And that’s how it works – raise loud cries of outrage over an illegal act that was caught using the safeguards that were put in place for just that situation, raise questions about the integrity of the entire elections system, and offer a solution that would not stop the identified problem and would, in fact, stop significant numbers of specific groups, generally groups who are already the most disenfranchised, from participating in elections.

This afternoon I'll be live blogging from ACORN's presidential forum, which is being held in the best city in America-- Philadelphia (hey, stop laughing, before I show you what we mean by "Brotherly Love"- think older brothers and noogies). Only three of the candidates--Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich-- are attending, but it still should be an interesting time.

The forum will be webcast on ACORN's site, and there will be a number of other bloggers there as well, including a few from some of the bigger liberal political blogs. For a full list of bloggers check ACORN's Candidate's Forum blog.

Update: there's no wireless here, and typing too much on my blackberry kills my thumbs, so I won't be able to really write much. It's packed here, and after a long wait and lots of call and answers/chants, Hillary just came on.didn't take long for the first screaming nut to start, and nobody is stopping him. This is really weird. Now they're trying to talk to him. And now, after two or three awkward minutes, he's leaving, screaming and singing all the way.

Update 2: I just left the Forum, after listening to Hillary's speech and the Q&A session. The Senetor from New York gave a really impassioned speech which was met by loud cheers, though I have to say that every time I hear Hillary talk about health care or a living wage or predatory lending (hello bankruptcy bill!). The more I see, the less I like, though I still think she'd be a formidable Democratic candidate, and she definitely shares her husband's ability to work a crowd

Either way, there was just no way I was going to wait around for Kucinich and then stand for an hour while he speaks, and I heard Edwards speak two weeks ago.

Update 3: Edwards just finished, and as usual I really like what he has to say about issues effecting the poor and working class in America. He didn't seem to get the same amount of cheering and applause as Hillary, though it could have been some combination of the fact that he went on over 3 hours after the event began and the cheering could be a lot less audible over the interwebs, but I was really surprised that ACORN member aren't going gaga over a guy who seems to be running mainly on their issues. I did think that Edwards statement that "I don't need to read your position papers... Because they're already my positions!" was a bit clumsily worded, and in general his orating abilities aren't at the same level as Clinton or Obama, but I definitely think he has more substance than either of them.