The stories are almost comical: Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, registered to vote Nov. 4. The entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team, signed up to go the polls — in Nevada.
But no one in either presidential campaign is laughing. Not publicly, anyway.
Republicans, led by John McCain, are alleging widespread voter fraud. The Democrats and Barack Obama say the controversy is just political mudslinging.
In the middle is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, a grassroots community group that has led liberal causes since it formed in 1970. This year, ACORN hired more than 13,000 part-time workers and sent them to 21 states to sign up voters in minority and poor neighborhoods. They submitted 1.3 million registration cards to local election officials.
Along the way, bogus ones appeared — signed in the names of cartoon characters, professional football players and scores of others bearing the same handwriting. And in the past few days, those phony registrations have exploded into Republican condemnations of far-ranging misconduct, and a relatively obscure community activist group took a starring role in the final presidential debate.
The raging argument boils down to essentially this: Is ACORN, according to McCain, perpetuating voter fraud that could be “destroying the fabric of democracy”? Or are Republicans trying to keep the disadvantaged, who tend to be Democrats, from casting ballots?
“This is all just one big head-fake,” said Tova Wang of the government watchdog group Common Cause. “What silliness this is, at this point. It’s all about creating this perception that there is a tremendous problem with voter fraud in this country, and it’s not true.”
On Friday, during a campaign appearance, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin repeated McCain’s recent claims that Obama has close ties to ACORN. Obama helped represent ACORN in a successful 1995 lawsuit against the state of Illinois, which forced enactment of the so-called motor-voter law, making it easier for people to register to vote. Obama said last week that he had “nothing to do with” ACORN’s massive voter registration drive.
Voter fraud is rare in the United States, according to a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the New York. The center’s report asserted most problems were caused by things like technological glitches, clerical errors or mistakes made by voters and by election officials.
