Mickey Mouse Registers to Vote (as a Democrat)
Post #3 – Accusations of voter fraud / voter-registration fraud against ACORN
A second controversy, accusations of widespread voter fraud, reveals (in a number of episodes) ACORN’s inattention to legal fine points and indifference to procedural safeguards, as well as the perils of paying part-time canvassers to register voters; it also exposes a deliberate smear of the organization – a smear exaggerated and amplified as part of a comprehensive electoral strategy (which has included voter suppression and the firings of federal prosecutors who declined to pursue baseless prosecutions to benefit the GOP’s election prospects). While ACORN has made missteps in the creation of this controversy, the principal villains in this drama on the public stage are ACORN’s political enemies, whose interests are advanced when people living at or near the poverty level (mostly in urban, minority, and working class neighborhoods) – in other words, low-propensity voters among traditionally Democratic constituencies – do not turn out to vote. These are, of course, among the folks ACORN targets in its voter-registration drives.
A reader, commenting on my previous post, objects to my characterizing this issue as ‘voter fraud,’ since the controversy also “includes persistent allegations of voter registration fraud….” I agree, to a point, and this distinction is at the heart of my assessment of this controversy (which I offer in the following paragraphs). The commentator is exactly right. But the distinction he makes is one that ACORN’s critics and reporters writing about the controversy – for the most part – failed to make. Furthermore, the political criticism directed against ACORN gained much of its sting, and the news value of the stories about this controversy was considerably enhanced, by conflating the two issues. In other words, what people heard about and read about, what the mainstream media reported, what the right wing echo chamber hammered away on, what the McCain campaign mostly said, was ‘voter fraud’ (not ‘voter registration fraud’). I didn’t cherry-pick my sources: check out the links to verify how this controversy was presented in the mainstream press. The accusation of voter fraud was the primary charge leveled at ACORN.
This controversy – in state after state across the country – played out in a familiar pattern. Part-time temporary workers – who get paid by the hour, but who are expected to show some results for their efforts – turn in handfuls of completed voter registration forms at the end of their shift, some of which turn out to be fraudulent.
Deborah Hastings of AP began her report (“ACORN Controversy: Voter fraud or mudslinging,” USA Today, October 18, 2008) on this controversy by noting receipt of voter registration forms from Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys – in Nevada. In 2008, ACORN and Project Vote submitted 1.3 registration forms, many with fraudulent signatures – most often of numerous individuals with identical handwriting.
What happened next depended on the vigilance and integrity of local ACORN staff. In Nevada, ACORN staffers (including a Las Vegas field director, who has pled guilty and been sentenced, and a deputy regional director, who has yet to come to trial) – both fired when wrongdoing came to light – were part of an illegal incentive scheme, dubbed ‘blackjack,’ to encourage a high-volume of new registrants.
In most instances, however, ACORN staffers flagged suspicious forms and then – as required by state law – submitted them to the registrar of voters, which threw out the fraudulent registrations after investigation. (ACORN often cooperates with local district attorneys and welcomes criminal prosecutions of the part-time temporary workers – who have cheated ACORN.) Yet even in cases where ACORN exercises due diligence, it gets blasted – falsely – for perpetrating voter fraud.
Putting Mickey Mouse’s name on a voter-registration form does not constitute voter fraud, much less the “massive voter fraud” that John McCain’s campaign alleged in October 2008 ACORN was perpetrating and which might be “destroying the fabric of democracy.”
Not quite. The fabric of our democracy is intact. To commit voter fraud requires presenting documentation at the polls – a driver’s license or phone bill, for instance – with Mickey Mouse’s name.
“Mickey Mouse may show up on a registration list, but he’s not likely to vote,” Daniel P. Tokaji of Ohio State’s School of Law advised Bob Drogin and David Savage (“McCain calls for ‘voter fraud’ inquiry” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2008).
“The pattern is that nothing much ever comes from this. There have been no known cases of people voting fraudulently,” says Alex Keyssar, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
A 2007 report, “The Truth About Voter Fraud [pdf],” by Justin Levitt the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s School of Law, which takes a dispassionate look at the issue, concluded, “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightening than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
“They are trying to scare people that there’s electoral fraud. But that’s not the case,” Amy Schur told Hiram Soto and Helen Gao (“ACORN active in voter registration in county,” Union-Tribune, October 16, 2008). “This is not about people who should not vote and are going to vote.”
The Congressional Research Office, in an investigation undertaken for the House Judiciary Committee [pdf], “did not identify any reported instances of individuals who were improperly registered by ACORN attempting to vote at the polls.”
This controversy counts as a strike against ACORN mostly because this smear has succeeded in slandering ACORN. A survey released on November 19, 2009 by Public Policy Polling, conducted one year after Barack Obama bested John McCain by a margin of more than 8½ million votes, revealed that “a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.”
In my next post – Conservative Activists’ Sting: The Undercover Videos – I look at the third controversy involving ACORN.
(Image from “The Colbert Report” via TPMtv.)
Related videos:
Previous posts in this series:
