the rix mix

Officials: FBI investigates ACORN for voter fraud

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election. A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation to The Associated Press on Thursday.

A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of recent raids on ACORN offices in several states for any evidence of a coordinated national scam.

A very misleading headline. Voter fraud is when a vote is fraudulently cast or fraudulently counted. You can register all the names in the local cemetery with the address Row X Plot Y. But if nobody casts those votes, or those registrations are rejected before they are entered on the rolls, no voter fraud has occurred. Anyone can write "Mickey Mouse" on a registration form & drop it in the mailbox. You don't need ACORN. If anyone in that organization has been fraudulently registering as a way of earning money, shame on them, it's a scam alright. But it isn't voter fraud, & I doubt many if any of the phony or duplicate registrants would've actually voted. Does it promote voter fraud? It could, but you'd have to show me where it has succeeded.

At street fairs & flea markets & other events, Dems & Repugs at tables ask everyone, "Have you registered to vote?" They sign up hardcore homeless, gangbangers, Thorazine foot-draggers, anyone. Nobody asks for official I.D. Here's the form, fill it out. Over at the rehab place where I used to take an art class, people were constantly bitchin' about Bush "policies," all of them were given the opportunity to legally register, & I'd bet not one-in-ten of them bothered to vote. Nor was there any organized effort to get them to vote, absentee or in person, by ACORN or any organization. The efforts are to register people. That's easy.

Getting people to vote is far more difficult. Unless you see a person fill out & seal an absentee ballot, or pick them up at home & drive them to the polling place, you can't be certain they voted at all. Well-organized local campaign operations devote Election Day to getting out the vote, old, reliable GOTV. I used to receive phone calls from local Democrats on Election Day asking if I needed a ride to go vote. At the polling place there are people called "challengers." Their job is to make sure your name really is "Mickey Mouse" or "Joe-the-Plumber" & that you legally reside in that district.

If massive voter fraud through phony registrations were possible, we'd still be doing it in New Jersey. Actual election fraud happens other ways, more difficult to prove; mainly through various methods of voter disenfranchisement, including fear tactics (they'll arrest you for all your unpaid parking tickets, they'll detain you until your illegal immigrant cousin turns himself in); trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater - dumping 1000 legit votes over one illegit; frivolous on-site challenges that back up lines for hours; computer "errors." The Palin/McCain campaign wants to throw suspicion on millions of legitimate voters; they want us to believe Obama can win only if hundreds of thousands of voters wearing Mickey Mouse masks suddenly show up at schools & libraries on Election Day in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, & New Hampshire, on buses driven by radical left community organizers, & nobody will bother to ask, "Say, are you the real Mickey Mouse?"

Labels: THE election