Maybe it was a full moon that prompted the
overwrought howls of outrage being directed at ACORN by John McCain and a
pack of his right-wing cohorts. Either that or just raw partisan nuttiness.
ACORN is the feisty and effective grass-roots
organization that is of, by and for low-income Americans. Its community
organizers have had remarkable success over the past three decades in
helping low-wage working folks gain a real say in how their families and
communities are treated by politicians, bankers, developers and other
elites.
In the past few elections, the group’s members
also have become a formidable force in national politics by going door to
door in their neighborhoods encouraging people to get involved in the
democratic process. They register them to vote, inform them on issues and
candidates, and urge them to turn out on Election Day. ACORN happens to be
very good at this exercise in old-fashioned, grunt-level democracy; this
year, the group has added 1.3 million new voters to the rolls.
So, unwilling to compete for the votes of these
families, McCain has surged down the road of slime politics by trying to
demonize the group itself. ACORN, McCain huffed furiously in the last
presidential debate, “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one
of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying
the fabric of democracy.”
The massive “fraud” that McCain and Gang
are howling so loudly about is hardly massive. Of the 1.3 million new
registration cards submitted to election officials across the country, only
a relative handful have fictional names, wrong addresses, etc. In Nevada,
for example, where ACORN has registered 80,000 new voters, fewer than 300
cards were questionable (0.4 percent), and guess who caught and flagged
these suspect registrants for the state election office? Bingo, if you said
ACORN staffers. It’s not in the group’s interest to turn in bad
cards, and staffers work diligently to cull them.
John McCain is the one committing voter fraud here.
This manufactured flapdoodle over ACORN is a disgraceful political attack
on a grass-roots group of citizens doing what democracy requires: getting
people involved.
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2008.
