ACORN is seed of controversy

Inter Lake editorial

A voting scandal is emerging across the United States with serious implications for the upcoming presidential election.

A group with a history of voter registration fraud called ACORN is currently under investigation in at least 13 states for widespread instances of nearly every type of conceivable voter fraud.

The reports are alarming, to say the least. Election officials are encountering blatant cases of fraudulent signatures, repeat registrations and false identification associated with ACORN's "get-out-the-vote" drives:

- In Lake County, Indiana, ACORN turned in 5,000 new registrations. The authorities there quit reviewing them after they found that the first 2,100 were all fraudulent, according to CNN.

- In Ohio, a young man is now famous for registering to vote more than 70 times, all at the urging of busy ACORN workers.

- In Houston, about 40 percent of 27,000 registration cards gathered by ACORN from January through July have been rejected or placed in limbo pending the gathering of more information, according to a report from the Houston Chronicle. About 6,600 were filled out by people already registered.

In Nevada, the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys offense has turned up on voter registration roles. Do we really have confidence that a Tony Romo in Nevada will be stopped from voting even after the real Tony Romo casts a ballot in Texas? People may want to believe there is some kind of super-computer cross-state checking to prevent that from happening, but we don't.

And we have to suppose that in the country's most populous counties, there is a strong potential for election departments to be so completely overwhelmed with ACORN registrations, along with the usual legitimate ones, that they cannot weed out all the fraud.

Barack Obama's connections to ACORN cannot be ignored either. In the 1990s, he was general counsel to the organization in Chicago, he steered millions in grant funding to ACORN as a board member for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and this year, his campaign contributed $800,000 to ACORN.

The campaign apparently didn't consider it a problem that the organization has a history of confirmed fraud and convictions in previous elections.

Incredibly, many voter fraud vulnerabilities stem from the Help Americans Vote Act, which came about as a response to the controversial outcome of the 2000 election.

But that controversy was all about the technicalities of a close race in the chad-lands of Florida. It was not about dead people, illegal immigrants, convicted felons, and children who are registered to vote or people who are registered to vote many times over.

For some in Democratic ranks, the 2000 election raised so much resentment that the presidency was considered "stolen," which certainly didn't help George W. Bush's efforts to govern. That resentment will pale in comparison to the complete disillusionment that could rise if widespread fraud is shown to have an influence on next month's election.