ACORN and Voter Suppression

ACORN is a community activist group that operates nationwide and has recently been accused of massive voter fraud by the McCain campaign. According to factcheck, Obama has “long and deep” ties to the group. In the past few weeks, the McCain campaign has accused the group of perpetrating voter fraud by intentionally submitting invalid registration forms. It wouldn't matter anyway, ACORN is not aloud to throw out registration forms even if they are suspected to be fraud. If there is suspicions that a form is fake then, according to factcheck, ACORN says that it first flags all suspicious registrations. Investigator Hayes followed up, confirmed that many registrations were faked, and found a former ACORN worker who confessed to faking most of her forms. ACORN is not just sittng by and letting their employees get away with this, a total of 33 employees have been fired for "suspicious" voter registration activities. Also according to factcheck, ACORN says that such raids are part of "a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression,"

Even though any attempt of fraud will have no affect of the presidential race the Obama campaign effectively pushing back against any GOP-inspired shenanigans. It is also said in Stop GOP Vote Suppression in a recent report in the New York Times found that in some battleground states, for every new voter registered two other voters have been removed. That is just one example of voter suppression, in UPDATED: Voter Suppression Growing Nationwide there is a portion of the article that talks about an incident where a college student was looking foward to voting in her first presidential election. Just two weeks before the article was written she got a letter from local election officials, it stated: "This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible to vote." She was one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information.

Voter suppression is becoming a serious problem and is a major scandal in my opinion. While on the other hand ACORN is not a very big scandal and can be taken care of easily. For example Freddie Johnson has registered to vote 42 times in Cuyahoga County since the first of the year. Most, if not all, of his sign-ups were solicited by canvassers for ACORN, but this cannot be controlled by ACORN, they have to turn in all registrtion forms by law, and ACORN is firing suspicous employees.