Washington, D.C. — Former Republican Senators John C. Danforth and Warren Rudman, who chair the McCain campaign’s Honest and Open Elections Committee, held a press conference in Washington Tuesday. According to Danforth and Rudman, widespread voter fraud could result in a “potential nightmare” at the polls this November.
Nearly all of the concern over voter fraud has focused on one group, the Association Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), which is under investigation or facing serious allegations of fraud in 13 states over how it has conducted voter-registration drives. ACORN insists, incredibly, that its voter-registration drives are nonpartisan activities. However, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has endorsed the group’s activities in the past and taught at their seminars. His campaign has paid them $800,000 for get-out-the-vote efforts, and ACORN’s political action committee has endorsed Obama.
The McCain campaign’s concern that ACORN may be engaging in illegal tactics to help Obama can hardly be called unfounded. NRO contributors Stanley Kurtz, Michelle Malkin, Deroy Murdock have provided a wealth of evidence on the organization’s troubling activities. However, given the barrage of negative publicity, ACORN is fighting back. In fact, they scheduled their own press conference at the National Press Club, immediately following the Danforth-Rudman press conference.
“We tried to get into the press conference to hear the allegations firsthand and, though we were the subject of the conference, we weren’t allowed in. We extended an invitation to them to come to our press conference, however,” ACORN executive director Steve Kess sniffed.
For their part, ACORN insists they have a rigorous quality-control process to prevent and weed out fraud. Their inability to provide basic information about their ongoing efforts would suggest otherwise. Had they been let into the earlier press conference, it’s hard to imagine how they would have responded to the McCain campaign allegations of voter fraud — given how their spokesman Kevin Whelan’s answered these questions from the press:
Out of the 13,000 workers responsible for collecting voter registrations how many have you fired for fraudulent activity? “It’s a good question, I don’t have the number but I can try to find out,” Whelan said.
Out of the 1.3 million voters registered by ACORN, is there any guess at how many are “Mickey Mouse” or duplicate registrations? “It probably won’t be after the election that we can tell you.”
Because state law requires you to submit every registration you collect, what percentage of the total voter registrations submitted does ACORN actually flag as being problematic before you send them in? “I want to not give a number that I can’t back up.”
Without offering evidence to back up their claim, ACORN insists that the number of voter registrations they collect that turn out to be fraudulent is only a “tiny fraction.” The press release announcing their press conference claims fraudulent voting “happens less often in the U.S. than death by lightning.” A memo made available to the press at the conference reads, “Fact: There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere casting an illegal vote as a result of phony voter registration.” Whelan also echoed these sentiments in person.
But you’d have to be naïve in the extreme, and know very little about voter fraud, in order to believe them. The same morning as ACORN’s press conference, the New York Post reported that “Investigators probing ACORN have learned that an Ohio man registered to vote several times and cast a bogus ballot with a fake address, officials said yesterday, as they revealed that nearly 4,000 registration applications supplied by the left-leaning activist group were suspect.” In other words, there’s no evidence ACORN is enabling “illegal voting as a result of phony voter registration” except, coincidentally, in the pages of one of America’s largest newspapers, on the very day they hold a press conference to profess their innocence.
ACORN’s memo argues that this kind of fraud is rare because, “Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work. Think of the risk someone would have to be motivated to take. They would be a sitting duck to be nabbed and prosecuted.”
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