Marble Falls     Having been organizationally involved in voter protection, voter registration, and getting people to vote, I guess I would have to admit that I take it personally, not just professionally.  I read a well-meaning piece by reporter Michael Wine in the Times that sought to document some of the efforts in states like Florida to retard registration, especially by local community and civic organizations.  Legislation that assesses fines and penalties for registration error has stopped many organizations in their tracks.  The story documents the drop in registrations by these groups from the local League of Women Voters to small grassroots efforts.  Weirdly, these local organizations were called “third-party” groups, as if they were foreign to the process and transplanted from some other place.  The aim of this Draconian legislation, that continues to be under legal challenge everywhere, is to stop people from being able to register.  To buy other claims is essentially to credit outright fabrication, especially since many of the same organizations and actors behind these voter suppression efforts have admitted as much.

I say “well-meaning,” but the reporter specializes in this area and without so much as a never mind included this paragraph, offering a fig leaf to the anti-democratic suppression efforts:

Suspicion from the right of voter registration groups has a long history. When an advocacy group for the poor known as ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms to officials in some states in 2008, Republicans built it into a major campaign issue. ACORN shut down in 2010.

The name and the year are right, as is the role of the Republicans, but otherwise it was sloppy and wrong, and even reading it at 5am, it was enough to get my blood boiling.  I couldn’t help, but write him an email immediately, even if I might be tilting at windmills.

            I don’t expect an answer.  Nonetheless, I’ll share it with you.

Michael Wine,

Your short paragraph on ACORN in today’s Times buys a right-wing argument hook, line, and sucker without comment.  ACORN and our sister organization were required by law in almost every state to submit any form filled out by a prospective voter seeking to register.  We literally would turn in stacks of forms to election officials marked “good” and “bad” essentially.  There was no pretense that when we turned in a form some joker had signed Mickey Mouse that Mr. Mouse was actually a voter or would vote.  These are the rules.  In all of the brouhaha cycle after cycle alleging that ACORN was turning in fraudulent forms or involved in so-called “voter fraud,” none ever went to court or were proven. This was simply a voter suppression trope.  Given your beat, it would be a shame for you to fall for this and repeat it mindlessly.

The contradiction inherent in the Florida law you cite, and many others like it, is that it transfers the ability to determine the accuracy of a registration form from election officials to the person doing the registration.  For all the sound and fury, how can that work in practice?  If a potential voter puts down the wrong zip code, does that make the person handling the registration liable?  If a potential voter puts down the right information, and in an excess of caution the volunteer doing the registration rejects it, and the potential voter shows up at the polls and finds she can’t vote, who is liable?  If she takes action, is she suing the person or organization who registered her, or the local election official and the state who promulgated the rule?

ACORN was attacked in this scurrilous manner cycle after cycle, but it was only in the perfect storm of 2008, when we registered over one-million people, that the issue exploded more permanently.  Someone like Kris Kobach ran for Secretary of State in that cycle claiming ACORN voter fraud, and we categorically had no staff or registers in Kansas at all.  Our membership-based board went into 2008 after long discussion about the inevitability that we would be attacked once again, but the board thought the necessity of getting our people registered was more important than any risk involved.  As you story points out, many groups are not willing to do so.  Possibly, they don’t weight the importance of voter registration as more important than being accused by voter suppressors and, in seems, reporters from the NYT of fraud.

Meanwhile ACORN after 54 years, ACORN works in 19 countries and has over 250,000 members.

When people who take as their mission keeping other citizens from voting in ostensibly democratic elections, it’s worth a harder look before you repeat their false claims about people and organizations who do voter registration.

best,

Wade Rathke, Chief Organizer and Founder of ACORN