Posted by Jed Lewison on Sun Oct 12, 2008 at 7:02 PM Pacific

The Vote Fraud Fraud

Tom Matzzie has an excellent post over at Huffington Post debunking the the GOP's fraudulent assault on "vote fraud" and ACORN.

Matzzie's overall contention is that the while McCain will lose this election, the GOP is going to try and claim that it was stolen by "community organizers" from "Chicago."

I've got no doubts they will try, but (a) as long as people like Matzzie get the facts out; and (b) we win this election by a large margin, it won't be an issue. Of course, it still is absolute bull that their charade might work in a close election, but hopefully we can just keep that a theoretical injustice.

Here's an excerpt from Matzzie's post:

The facts about ACORN are worth getting out. ACORN is an organization that, among other things, registers low-income people to vote. One of the ways they do this is to hire door-to-door canvassers from the neighborhoods they are working in. This sort of work is tightly regulated. So, when one of the thousands of people they give jobs to doesn't do their work right and brings back bogus or phony voter registration cards, the law REQUIRES that ACORN turn the forms in to the voter registration office. The law, rightly, doesn't want anybody throwing out voter registration forms for any reason.

But ACORN goes a step farther. They have people assigned to do quality control on all the cards--calling people on the forms after they fill them out. When they find bad information on the cards they attach a cover sheet to the card but, as mentioned above, they turn in the cards as required by law. The effect is that a few bad canvassers or a poorly run office will mean that bad cards are submitted as part of the normal process. But ACORN has done everything possible to make sure voting officials know to check the forms.

The sad fact is that in at least one state--Nevada--the voting officials disregarded ACORN's cover sheets flagging the voter registration forms. That should have never happened. The resulting blowup was a scandal in search of a scandal.

The stunning con of this whole thing is the assumption that bad voter registration cards being submitted will lead to vote fraud. If somebody submits a card for Mickey Mouse it isn't like Mr. Mouse is going to show up to vote. There is no voter fraud if nobody votes.