Electoral scandals: ACORN vs. vote suppression

- CNN commentary on voting dangers by Donna Brazile - Oct. 27 2008

- CNN "voter purges" article by Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein

- Market Watch RNC article ACORN and voter registration - Oct. 8 2008

- NY Times article by Bob Herbert - August 16, 2004

- Huffington Post vote suppression article by Michael Carmichael - Oct. 21 2008

- Democracy Now transcript on vote rigging by Greg Palast - Oct. 9 2008

- Factcheck on ACORN

   ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been at the center of a fierce controversy in recent months over their voter registration scandal. This controversy, fueled primarily by rabid Republicans, has been dubbed by many experts to be of little overall consequence in relation to electoral subversion. The dispute centers on the fact that ACORN solicitors submitted numerous false voter registration forms in order to meet certain goals set by the organization. The frauds were not instigated by the organization itself, which helps explain why no charges have been filed against ACORN amidst the storm of political outrage spearheaded by McCain and Palin. In fact, ACORN is required by law to submit all of the forms they receive from their canvassers to local election officials, and leave it up to them to weed out the falsified forms, (see factcheck.org) although they flag suspicious candidates. This information alone practically nullifies the Republican outrage, since if ACORN discarded the forms themselves everyone would be screaming about how the organization broke the chain of bureaucracy. As stated by nearly every competent source, the real concern should be vote suppression, a much more worrisome and realistic possibility. According to Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist;

"A simple cost-benefit analysis tells us this [registration fraud] is not a reasonable or significant threat. The real threat here is the Republican Party using attacks on ACORN as a calculated strategy to justify massive challenges to the votes cast in Democratic-leaning voting precincts on Election Day. And this is what is truly outrageous, but where is John McCain's concern when it comes to people being harassed at the voting booth?"

Any person who values the system of democracy America enjoys and played such a central role in establishing should be at the very least concerned about this underhanded strategy. 

   Sadly, it seems as though there has always been a group of people unable to see past their prejudices, adamant that they alone are aware of the truth of events, and therefore have the right to determine the progress of millions. The process of vote suppression is a very subtle one, a stratagem adopted due to the obsolete, blatant quality of stealing votes or directly cheating the system to boost vote count. Instead of trying to increase a candidate's numbers, vote suppression calls for reducing the opponent's, or making it more difficult for people to vote in choice areas in order to tip the balance in battleground states. The forms this process can take are legion, from invalidating an individual's voter registration form due to trivial details, to reducing the number and accessibility of polls, even to discarding thousands of registrations because of "malfunctions", which, though sorted out later, prevent those people from voting. An excerpt from a CNN article paints a vivid picture of the sort of tactics officials can employ: 

"'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,' a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections said. But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a passport and a birth certificate to prove it. The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter was postmarked October 9."

Later in that same article the situation was elaborated on: 

"'What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation,' said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice."

Obviously, records will need to be updated prior to elections, and modifications to the lists of eligible voters is not inherently suspicious, but the danger lies in using those same updates as an excuse to meddle with the "fabric of democracy", as McCain so eloquently puts it (albeit in the wrong context). 

   Personally, I cannot express in mere word the disgust I feel towards those who perpetrate vote suppression, as it is such a shameless manifestation of greed, perhaps one of human beings' most prevalent and base vices. The greed is not even material, (a type of compulsion which I believe to be more easily excusable and evolutionarily justified) but a sickening perceived superiority which manifests as a refusal to consider the opinions of others valuable. I believe that such an activity should be an imprisonable offense, (perhaps it already is, I am not quite sure) and that courts should give serious consideration to the death penalty during the judicial process.