The New York Times' lead editorial today offers strong support for the grassroots organization, ACORN, currently under siege in the right wing blogosphere.
Based on the information that has come to light so far, the charges appear to be wildly overblown — and intended to hobble Acorn’s efforts.
The group concedes that some of its hired canvassers have turned in tainted forms, although they say the ones with phony names constitute no more than 1 percent of the total turned in. The group also says it reviews all of the registration forms that come in. Before delivering the forms to elections offices, its supervisors flag any that appear to have problems.
According to Acorn, most of the forms that are now causing controversy are ones that it flagged and that unsympathetic election officials then publicized.
ACORN has behaved honorably through this crisis, and deserves our support.
ACORN has at last responded formally by launching a web site yesterday to push back on these attacks.
On this site, they point out that
Ever since right-wing conservatives got wind of ACORN's record-setting voter registration drive, their attempts to discredit the work and create an atmosphere of chaos and intimidation have multiplied daily against the organization. Rather than compete for the votes of these new voters, they have resorted to lies and smears to distract voters from the serious issues facing the United States as Election Day draws near.
They also have launched an action site where you can contribute time, money and moral support. I've worked alongside ACORN on more than one occasion and they are fierce advocates for the rights of tenants and foreclosed homeowners. The best part is the way they train ordinary people in the art of direct action and citizen protest.
Here's their new video to highlight their hard work:
To conclude, the Times points out that it's the inherent unfairness, historically and today, in the rules for registering that disenfranchise voters, that makes private registration drives necessary.
The answer is for government to a better job of registering people to vote. That way there would be less need to rely on private registration drives, largely being conducted by well-meaning private organizations that use low-paid workers. Federal and state governments should do their own large-scale registration drives staffed by experienced election officials. Even better, Congress and the states should adopt election-day registration, which would make such drives unnecessary.
Bill Clinton put his support behind Motor/Voter legislation that simplified the registration process, making it more available to busy citizens. The next Congress and the Obama presidency can go even further to ensure real democracy, using the recent and the 1965 legislation to protect voter rights by making standards more uniform, and registration more accessible.
ACORN was trying to help rectify an imperfect system. The idea that this should be left to underfunded organizations, who rely on poorly paid staff to carry out the work, makes a mockery of democracy itself. They deserve our staunch support.
When everybody votes, the progressive agenda wins.
UPDATE: Thanks to debk for writing about this earlier today: David Iglesius said about the FBI probe into the ACORN registration forms
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."
UPDATE II: Courtesy of Agathena in the comments below, Fla. Gov. Charlie Crist (R) has this to say:
''I think that there's probably less [fraud] than is being discussed. As we're coming into the closing days of any campaign, there are some who enjoy chaos,
UPDATE III: Bill Mahar aptly dismisses the GOP's ACORN hype in his interview with Larry King last night (hat tip politicoscott, Nonie3234, and Deoliver47) around minute 7:01: