ACORN caused the credit crisis

ACORN in Las Vegas is under investigation for attempting to register the Dallas Cowboys as Nevada voters (AP, Fox!) -- a doubly objectionable violation of voter registration laws, if true, since everyone knows that the Cowboy organization has been a hotbed of wingnuttery since its inception. You'd think they could at least have gone with the 49ers. Or the Eagles.

This would be a lot easier to suspect as an incident of the War Party getting an early start on election-riggery of some sort or another if the Tuesday raid of ACORN's office wasn't signed off on by the Nevada Secretary of State, who is a Democrat. Of sorts.

Anyway, all the news organizations everywhere are running at least three sentences about the story because the Republicans hate community organizers and Barack Obama is black. So Barack Obama can't be president no matter how many votes he gets, because ACORN bombed us on 9-11. Or something.

UPDATE: ACORN has put out a statement saying "When we have identified suspicious applications, we have  separated them out and flagged them for election officials" but the NV SOS office wasn't interested. The full statement is after the jump.

Meantime, the Republican National Committee has scheduled a conference call with the press Wednesday so that good little War Party apparatchiks can jump all over the Las Vegas raid, mainly because it's not: a) George W. Bush, b) the war, c) the economy or d) any other issue that a voter actually cares about. In other words, it's exactly the type of bullshit the RNC is looking for about now.

ACORN Statement from Bertha Lewis, Interim Chief Organizer, on raid of Las Vegas office

 

October 07, 2008:

     

"Over the past year, ACORN has worked hard to help over 80,000 people in Clark County register to vote. As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have reviewed all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations.

"For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application in to election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual.

"Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 'problem application packages,' which involved 33 former canvassers.

"On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.

"Today's raid by the Secretary of State's Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than to discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls."

Comments

[Dude]

ACORN's canvassers were under enormous pressure to make arbitrary and unrealistic registration quotas - make 'em or be fired.
That is dumb and undoubtedly led to problems. But it's important to keep in mind - and yes, even the wingnuts jumping all over this need to realize - that no one impersonating Tony Romo is going to try to vote. These are phantom registrations that will not lead to a single false vote.
If there is evidence of voter "fraud" in bad registrations, there is no evidence of fraud in the actual vote.

[IronJawed]

Hehehe! You are too funny Mr. Gleaner.