On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.
The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.
[From Group’s Tally of New Voters Was Vastly Overstated - NYTimes.com]
All the hubbub about Acorn and voter fraud is part of a larger. long-standing effort by Republicans to cast doubt on the voting process (and no doubt also to direct attention away from their own shenanigans). Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse will not be showing up at the polls to vote for D's. Nonetheless this revelation about Acorn's registration efforts is discouraging because it means the great flood of newly-registered, presumably young, presumably pro-O voters may not really be there. And it also means, perhaps, more confusion, delay, and acrimony at the polls on election day as hundreds of thousands get turned away at the door. None of which is good news.
I've been convinced for quite some time that part of the Republican strategy here is to create widespread confusion leading to distrust of election results (in part by leveraging concerns on the left about the veracity of voting machines) and re-creating Florida, 2000, but on a much wider and more devastating scale.
I know, I know, that sounds paranoid as hell, and I hope that's all it is. But I, for one, am not going to trust this one until the fat lady sings to the last note.
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