Marble Falls      Yikes, it’s déjà vu all over again.   I got an email and then an invitation to a zoom radio broadcast.  The Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group I knew and had actually done some workshops with in Youngstown some years ago, had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department over voter registration.  Was this the ACORN voter registration attack of 2008 once again?

The news report indicated that 125 FBI agents had swooped in on the organization taking computer hard drives and other records, visiting canvassers and others at their homes, and more as part of their broad subpoena and investigation.  Without sharing details, the investigation was targeting their voter registration efforts.  Other reports also underlined their opposition to efforts by the legislature to require photo identification for voters to access the polls.

This is the same, but different.

It’s hard not to see the totally politicized Trump Justice Department and FBI trying to implement a policy to curry favor with the White House and further Trump’s voter suppression program.  As part of this package, recently the US Post Office discussed refusing to handle mail ballots for the election for states that had not surrendered their voter registration data to the federal government.  Trump has repeatedly ranted about state election procedures and made false claims of voter fraud.

When ACORN was in the crosshairs almost twenty years ago, the driving force was the Republican National Committee and the campaign of Arizona Senator John McCain facing off against Illinois Senator Barack Obama. The allegations were generalized and the only office records seizure was in Nevada based on a state law about the conduct of voter registration canvassers and how they were paid, and less about the White House.  In an earlier cycle, the Bush II Attorney General had tried to threaten and fire US district attorneys in a huge political scandal for failing to indict ACORN for its voter registration practices, because they couldn’t find evidence of any laws being broken despite the Republican pressure campaign, so the federal government was more subdued in 2008, even if aligned.  For the Ohio nonprofit, there seems to be a much straighter line to the White House.

For thirty years this has mainly been smoke without any fire.  Importantly, a wrong registration, whether in error or deliberate, does not equal voter fraud, because registration is different than voting.  Endless investigations in state after state, think Arizona and Georgia, at great expense have failed to find other than random and occasional instances of an ineligible person casting a ballot.  Until 2008, ACORN had weathered the accusations every election cycle, particularly in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio, when they were battleground states, and by December after the elections were over the charges and lawsuits were withdrawn.  The problem after the attack on ACORN for registering almost a million voters in 2008, given the antipathy to Obama on the right, many groups from community organizations to the League of Women Voters, were unwilling to risk engaging in voter registration for fear of attack.  The requirements that all registration forms, valid and obviously invalid, have to be submitted to the local elections office, exposes any organization to false claims even if they acknowledge the error on some forms to be rejected, as ACORN did with forms signed by Mickey Mouse or the Dallas Cowboys.

This attack on OCC so early in the registration cycle for the November midterms is clearly a signal that the federal government means to chill registration and suppress the vote.  Judging from the radio zoom that I was on last night, this time perhaps everyone will stand together to support OCC and other groups and learn from the lessons that burying their heads in the sand by too many, when ACORN was attacked in 2008, doesn’t work and hurts democracy.