Is it voter fraud or voter suppression?

By D.T. Holt

I think it would be difficult to find anyone who doesn’t agree that voter fraud is reprehensible and that we should do whatever we can to keep it from happening. However, I think there is some question as to whether ACORN has perpetrated voter fraud. The fact that a small number of more than 13,000 registration assistance workers hired by the organization have willfully turned in inaccurate or sometimes fictitious registrations does not prove that the organization itself has engineered, as John puts it, “a systematic corruption of our voting system.”

It is instructive that the conservative pundits who are accusing ACORN of trying to steal this election fail to point out that in almost every instance which has been reported, it was actually ACORN who discovered the bad forms and called them to the attention of election officials. They also fail to mention that ACORN is required by law to hand over each and every registration that they collect. They are not required to verify the forms and flag those that are suspicious for further investigation by the election commission and yet ACORN has done exactly that at considerable expense to their organization. If their intent was systematic corruption of our voting system, what would be their motivation to draw attention to the registrations that they have been unable to verify?

Another point that the conservative pundits fail to make about the discrepancies in voter registrations is that many of them are routine in nature. John sites the estimated 200,000 of 660,000 new Ohio voters with records that don’t match. It is crucial to point out that the most minor of differences between the information on the registration form and the databases used for verifying registrations would constitute a record that doesn’t match and therefore requires further investigation. For example, if I were to register to vote as “Dan Holt” instead of “Daniel T. Holt,” that would constitute a record that does not match. While these types of differences cause additional verification by election officials, they do not constitute voter fraud, nor do they lead to anyone having the opportunity to cast an extra vote.

In any voter registration drive, there will be false registrations for the likes of Mickey Mouse. There will always be anecdotal evidence such as the teenager in Ohio who registered multiple times. However, there still isn’t clear proof that these false registrations have lead to widespread fraudulent voting. John’s example of the recent case in New Mexico, in which the GOP reviewed 92 ballots and found 28 to be fraudulent, doesn’t seem to be true. ACORN was able to locate and verify several of the so-called false registrants within a day or so. Even if the claim is true, are 92 ballots a representative sample in a state where thousands of new voters were registered in advance of the Democratic primaries? Does the fact that the investigation was undertaken by a Republican lawyer who played a central role in an effort to pressure a U.S. attorney to bring politically motivated voter fraud cases have any effect on the credence of the voter fraud claims?

The only systematic attempt that I see in all of this is the systematic attempt of the conservative punditry and the McCain/Palin campaign to throw the results of the coming election into question. This is nothing short of an attempt to suppress or disenfranchise millions of new voters simply because they are more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate on November 4th.