Suppressing fraudulent votes?

NY Times:

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.

In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly.

“We were wondering how many were Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse,” said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “The group is really tainted, and any work they do is suspect.”

Republicans had been prepared for months to make an issue of Acorn’s registration drive. A year ago, the party’s national committee anticipated the surge of new registrations by putting a map of the country on its Web site, labeled “You Can’t Make This Up! Vote Fraud.”

Democrats and officials with Acorn accuse Republicans of trying to manufacture a controversy to deflect attention from alleged voter suppression activities in several states. Election officials and experts say there is little chance that significant numbers of supporters of either party would actually try to vote through a fraudulent registration.

Over the last few weeks, the Acorn registration drive has become a flash point in the campaign when the flood of new voter registrations prompted complaints from election officials about the high number of improper submissions. State and local officials have begun investigations into possible fraudulent activity in at least 10 states.

If interviews with two dozen voters in the swing states of Florida and Ohio are any indication, Republicans’ efforts appear to have resonated with some members of their own party as well as with some independents and Democrats.

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The Republican drive to publicize Acorn’s problems has had another less visible impact on the race, shifting the focus of election lawyers in the homestretch to the Nov. 4 election. Much of the Democratic team of lawyers and operatives who had intended to work on monitoring voter rights at the polls has instead played defense the last two weeks, responding to accusations of fraud.

The Obama campaign has also sought to deflect Republican efforts to tie Acorn’s registration campaign to the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. The Republicans highlighted a federal election filing by the Obama campaign that showed an $832,598 payment last February to an Acorn affiliate, Citizens Services Inc., for “staging, sound, lighting.” The Republicans suggested that the payment was actually for voter registration. But the Obama campaign said it had mislabeled the payment, and it filed an amended report that reflects the money was for get-out-the-vote efforts.

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In the Democrat fantasy land there are no fraudulent voters and Republicans are always trying to suppress legitimate voters. It is harder for Democrats to sustain that worldview this year when the evidence of ACORN's fraud is so obvious and the lack of evidence of any suppression continues.

The Republicans are trying to keep the Democrats from cheating and trying to steal the election and that seems to disturb the Democrats, but not even the Obama media can come up with an example of actual suppression while the evidence of fraud is abundant. It is also getting harder to hide the pretense that ACORN is anything other than a front group of the Demcorats and the Obama campaign. They are like the the various PLO front groups who do the dirty work while the PLO feigns a lack of envolvement.

If the Demcorats take over congress and the presidency, you can expect this situation to get worse.