ACORN and Fox

If you have spent five minutes during the last week watching Fox News you have heard about ACORN or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Now that a McCain win is looking less and less feasible in November, Fox News is proud to bring you the neighborhoods responsible for beating McCain, low and moderate income neighborhoods that, my God, have black people in them.

Sorry, just a little rant before I continue.

No, really, Fox News is going crazy with this story. Nope, they wouldn't be touching it if McCain had a 7 to 10 point lead in most national polls. I'm just trying to be fair and balanced by saying that.

Here is the story. ACORN organizers pay people to register voters. The people that are registering voters for ACORN are sometimes jobless or they are working for ACORN to make a little money on the side because they are struggling financially. Side note: When working this summer for the Obama campaign I ran into people working for ACORN. They were always friendly to me and were often canvassing streets and neighborhoods before we even got there. The ACORN employees, just like us in the Obama camp, cannot refuse to register a voter because that voter might vote for McCain. Although ACORN endorsed Obama, that doesn't mean they are only targeting potential Obama voters.

Moving on, ACORN employees aren't paid if they continually fail to register voters. So, some of these employees have devised a scheme. They can fill out the voter reg forms with fake names and addresses and turn them in. Their supervisors don't know the difference. They count up the forms and see that the employee has matched their quota for the day and they pay the person doing the voter reg. A simple, easy scam, but to be clear, there is absolutely no solid number of how many people have been doing this for ACORN. Fox would like you to believe that everyone registering voters for ACORN is committing election fraud, but that's not the case. There are a few of them and ACORN has been 100% cooperative with the agencies doing the investigation. ACORN actually encourages investigations of their employees if any election fraud charges are brought against them.

Fox would also like you to believe that all sorts of people are going to be showing up at the polls twice on November 4th, first as themselves and then as this mysterious person that they made up on a voter registration card. This is impossible. First of all, here in Wisconsin and every other state I have lived in, the election commission is responsible for confirming the address and name of the voter with a driver's license number and a mailing that usually lists the polling place so the voter knows where to go on election day. In Wisconsin you can't vote without a valid DL number or a state ID number.

I could go on about the impossibility of successfully casting thousands of fradulent ballots or a number much, much larger in order to actually influence the outcome of an election, but I won't. I just wanted to let you know that no matter how much spin Fox puts on this story in the coming weeks, the problem is not as big as they say and it isn't going to change the outcome of this election.

I think the outcome of this election is going to be fair and balanced. Don't let Fox spin it any other way.