I am saddened and only slightly surprised to admit that ACORN hasn't gotten the message out about this. There is a huge defense out there just waiting to be explored, and it should be, at the very least by CNN, if not Foux Newes. Even the decent stories that correctly assert the fact that ACORN is the only one actually being defrauded in these occasional "Mickey Mouse" instances have continued ACORN itself of being sloppy. This is still serving the rightwing agenda. As long as the story includes ACORN doing a bad job, they feel it ignites the base and fuels the speculation fires. Newsflash: voter registration drives are always messy. But this year ACORN ran the best damn v.r. drive I have ever seen.
At the start of the recent ACORN voter registration drive, I was a Head Organizer tasked with overseeing the process, along with our other operations such as community organizing and grant writing.. I recently left that job to go back to school for the fall, but I got a good taste of what their procedure was, which I will lay here for all to see. This was my second election doing v.r. work with ACORN, and I was amazed and even comforted by this year's newfound level of anal retentiveness that each office was required to adopt at every stage of the process. Surely the right wing smear machine would have better things to do considering our level of detail and precision, I remember thinking.
First a little background: we'd had some smaller versions of the current controversy explode in our faces in past elections, and, admittedly, some of them were preventable on our end. Note that we have NEVER been guilty of contributing to voter fraud, because it just doesn't work that way. And the work we do is no different than a person going into their local board of elections and filling out a card wrong or right, and turning it in. We actually help the Board of Elections, always have, by doing our own pre-screening. So these isolated issues would arise between one particularly sloppy office and their local elections board from time to time, but on the whole this was pretty rare. Then starting in 2004 the attacks on ACORN got more systematic. We stepped up our quality control as well as our P.R. strategy, releasing studies on the tactic of smearing voter registrars as election riggers. 2006 was really the kicker, when we were nearly investigated by the D.O.J. and had a number of state Attorney's general look into us before the elections, insinuating voter fraud. We thought we could simply stick to our guns, saying that when you attempt to promote voting in minority and low-to-moderate income communities, these kind of baseless attacks are innevitable. We called it a tempest in a teapot. It didn't work, entirely. Soon we found out why: Karl Rove was in play. He was on to us and had his henchman Al Gonzalez systematically scattering this chum, causing both the media and the boards of elections to go into a mild frenzy.
This election was supposed to be different. I lobbied hard to get some funding to do voter registration in my state. I was able to raise enough to have a crew of 5-10 workers including a newly created position called "quality control call center manager". I hired an old Lady named Denise to do for this job, because she was very ocd, and the job required it. Denise's job was to scrutinize every card, call each one back and verify the information, and keep track of each employee, gathering a batch sheet from each one of them daily, with their signature testifying that each card is correctly filled out to the best of their knowledge. This much was all traditional. Normally, in previous elections, (I'm pretty sure), once that was done we just simply toss out any bad cards (it used to be legal until the "help america vote act"), fire any employee who had been caught faking, and turn the rest in. But this year, that was just the beginning..
Next Denise would fill out her own batch report and sign it to vouch for the performance of the workers and the integrity (or lack thereof) of the cards. She would then scan all of this into the computer and send over a very secure system each image to a brand new "quality control headquarters" in Texas somewhere. The idea here was supposed to be to cover our asses a second time by having a completely independent, highly qualified third set of eyes looking over each and every card and flagging any that were suspicious or wrong. After that was completed, Denise would receive a report back, and incorporate any new finds into her final results. She would then sort the cards into two piles, attach a sticky with a description of the problem to any problematic card, and then turn the two piles over to me to be turned into the board of elections.
My job was maintaining good relations with the notoriously testy B.O.A. I arranged meetings with their officials along with all the other V.R. drives in the city. we all agreed that ACORN's quality control program was the most comprehensive that any had ever seen. I was asked to turn the cards in often to avoid jamming up the system as much as possible, which was not a problem. In the end, around the registration deadline, the jammups are innevitable, however, and that's when the clerks start getting testy... Karl Rove is basically just tapping into that emotional vein for all it's worth..
ACORN could be doing a better job defending their work. Obama would probably be the best person to get the message out about just how not-sloppily we registered 1.3 million under- represented new voters this year, but I think it's too late for him to come to ACORN's defense. Some congressman should act as ACORN's surrogate and fight the FAUx news knuckleheads on the challenge that ACORN's work was that sloppy. Some honest journalist should look into this, especially now that McCain has claimed that we are threatening the fabric of Democracy or whatever. But, I suppose I dream...
After all this careful preparation, the republicans are still successfully branding us as election riggers. They really need to go to hell. We are ACORN, and we're the largest grassroots organization of low- to- moderate income families in the country, and yet we can't get a second of balanced media coverage. And Sarah Palin has the nerve to call it the liberal gotcha media, that's rich. Kick ACORN a few bucks, and while you're there, check out their new detailed reportcountering McCain's new claim that ACORN caused the housing crisis by demanding that predatory lenders curb their practices and allow people to stay in their homes.