The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) have apparently been caught filing thousands of fraudulent voter registrations in Indiana and other states. The forms were flagged after poll workers noticed many of the signatures looked the same. Turns out several were in the names of dead people, and another was in the name of a fast food restaurant. ACORN is a left-leaning group that has endorsed Barack Obama. Obama's campaign paid one of ACORN's subsidiaries $800,000 to help register voters ahead of the November election. Obviously, the Republicans have latched onto this as evidence of Obama trying to commit voter fraud. And of course, that's not quite the case. For one thing, there's no evidence that Obama's campaign money went to pay for these fraudulent registration forms. And for another, voter registration fraud isn't the same thing as voter fraud. In other words, no fake votes were cast, and there's no way all these fake voters could possibly show up at the polls anyway. (They are, after all, dead.) ACORN is claiming these charges are a government conspiracy to keep voters disenfranchised. I don't know about that, but the whole scheme still doesn't make any sense. If you're going to throw an election, you have to do one of two things: cast actual votes or use a Diebold machine. More details here.
