GOP Claiming Voter Fraud Even Before The Election

What the Republicans are doing is setting the stage to declare that Barack Obama won illegitimately.  They know they’re going to lose, and lose big.  They know that they’re losing among independents and even Republicans repulsed by what’s going on in this country.  So they are going to claim that Obama won only because too many people registered to vote illegally.

Step one for the GOP is to demonize ACORN, the group that prominently registers voters in places like Obama’s hometown of Chicago.  The next stop is to tie ACORN to Obama.  We’ve already shown how this is being overstated.

Tom Matzzie at Huffington has some specifics on how ACORN operates.

The facts about ACORN are worth getting out. ACORN is an organization that, among other things, registers low-income people to vote. One of the ways they do this is to hire door-to-door canvassers from the neighborhoods they are working in. This sort of work is tightly regulated. So, when one of the thousands of people they give jobs to doesn’t do their work right and brings back bogus or phony voter registration cards, the law REQUIRES that ACORN turn the forms in to the voter registration office. The law, rightly, doesn’t want anybody throwing out voter registration forms for any reason.

But ACORN goes a step farther. They have people assigned to do quality control on all the cards–calling people on the forms after they fill them out. When they find bad information on the cards they attach a cover sheet to the card but, as mentioned above, they turn in the cards as required by law. The effect is that a few bad canvassers or a poorly run office will mean that bad cards are submitted as part of the normal process. But ACORN has done everything possible to make sure voting officials know to check the forms.

Intimidating potential voters and groups that register them can lead to voter purging and suppression.  The best insurance against false claims of dirty pool by the right would be a substantial win for Obama.  As long as it’s close, they’ll claim it’s not a real victory.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.