The continuing saga of of FOX's obsession with ACORN

News Hounds - October 8, 2008

Much as they were with "drill here, drill now," FOX and Friends is on a daily mission to cast suspicion of the organization ACORN, accusing them of complicity in voter fraud cases, and essentially trying to steal the election for Barack Obama, who they are also trying to link to ACORN via his previous work with Project Vote.

[...] According to FOX, authorities went in to confiscate records of fraudulent registrations. But unbeknownst to FOX viewers, ACORN had already been cooperating with authorities to combat voter fraud, according to a press release yesterday:

For Immediate Release: October 7, 2008

ACORN Statement from Bertha Lewis, Interim Chief Organizer, on Incident in Las Vegas:

"Over the past year, ACORN has worked hard to help over 80,000 people in Clark County register to vote. As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have review all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations.

For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application into election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual.

Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 "problem application packages," which involved 33 former canvassers.

On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.

Today's raid by the Secretary of State's Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls."

[...] Note that Steve Doocy alleges that ACORN is itself involved in the voter fraud, not the individuals submitting the fraudulent applications; note too that Gretchen Carlson cites one instance of a woman registering (not voting) multiple times in Missouri as evidence of fraud "all over the place." And last but not least, note that Eric Shawn is waving registrations which are either evidence of a crime or valid, complete with identifying personal information, on national television.

Barack Obama's work in 1992 as Director of Project Vote in Chicago, registering low-income people and minorities to vote, was dragged out as some kind of indictment that he is closely connected with the accusations of today. This whole ACORN assault is a trumped up Republican crusade to cast doubt on election results should Obama win (which polls indicate he will) and to prime the pump for lawsuits challenging That One's win.

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NOTE: Voter REGISTRATION Fraud is not Vote Fraud, and both of those are different from ELECTION FRAUD. Voter Registration Fraud is when someone gets paid to go out and get people registered and they fill out bogus forms with fake names like Mickey Mouse in order to get paid more without registering more people. If they register a zillion people named Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, none of them can VOTE, so the only crime is that someone submitted forms filled out with bogus names to get paid more. Dead people or fake names can't show up and vote, so it's a false accusation. Vote Fraud is rare, and it is when someone tries to vote who is not supposed to or, for example, someone would pay a homeless person to go in and vote republican for money. ELECTION FRAUD, however, is what the republicans have been doing all over the country for at least 8 years, and probably a lot longer. It involves MANY methods to include rigged electronic voting machines with no way to recount, intimidation, tricking people, purging rolls of names to keep them from voting, jamming phone lines, not having enough machines in the polling place, and MUCH MORE, including trying to use the bogus argument that somehow voter registration fraud has ANY effect on the election whatsoever. ACORN was the one who REPORTED the people who ripped them off by filling out forms with fake names. THEY didn't do it, and any of the fraudulent registrations will not result in any votes, since those people either don't exist or they are famous names that are obvious to anyone, such as the entire lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. So, Voter Registration Fraud has virtually no effect on anything, other than causing ACORN a lot of extra work ... Voter Fraud is almost non-existent ... and Election Fraud is RAMPANT and DEADLY and has cost us the last two presidential elections. It is going to cause us to lose this one, too, if we don't keep our eyes on the ball. These fake accusations by rightwing fascists who cannot win without cheating are nothing but a red herring. But REAL Election Fraud that is being perpetrated all over the country, STILL, is a threat to our democracy. People need to understand the difference, because unless they do, they are going to continue to believe the squawking heads on TV who are making people believe that it's the Democrats who are committing fraud, when just the opposite is true.