ACORN: It's All About the Numbers

A couple of days ago, Barack Obama and the Obama Campaign team discounted the activities of ACORN as either insignificant or an attempt by the Republicans to suppress the vote. However, Mr. Obama and his team seem to be ignoring the fact that half of the fraud complaints and lawsuits that have been filed against ACORN are from Democratic Secretary's of State and Democratic Attorney's General. Even honest Democrats smell a rat.

Obama, himself, discounted all these activities by questioning whether the personnel in a voter's registration office would actually allow a falsely registered Dallas Cowboy to vote. I have a clue for Mr. Obama. I would seriously doubt that any more than a handful of people working in any voter registration office across this country actually know the names of all the individual players on the Dallas Cowboys. My experience is that most of these workers are older woman. Not hardly your tailgating, beer drinking, Sunday football couch-potatoes that follow pro football.

Further, the vote is counted only after the absentee ballot has been separated from its envelope and the name and credentials of the submitting voter are no longer known. No one will ever be able to go back to see if a fraudulent vote was cast. The time to catch the fake names was at the time of registration when those names were initially entered into the state's database. After that, voter fraud is free to run rampant. In Chicago, the city that Obama comes from and which has a history of fraudulent voting, the standing joke is "vote early and often." Year after year, Chicago's elections are flooded with dead voters. That's the legacy of the first Mayor Daley. One can only wonder if the Obama election team and ACORN are following in the "Daley" tradition.

ACORN actually doesn't really care about the quality of their efforts. It's all about the numbers. The numbers are power. If false voter registrations slip into the system and some people are able to vote more than once; then, so be it. That's just gravy. Beyond that, though, the numbers of new voters being registered is the real meat. First, ACORN doesn't register Republicans. Their whole thrust is to increase the Democratic voter rolls. As a special interest group, this gives them control over Democrats. That's the real power they seek. The power to influence policy. They know that, to a politician, increasing the base of voters is often more important than any campaign contributions. It means you don't have to spend a dime to get that vote.

The other thing that happens when one political party has more registrations than another is that it skews the polling. Pollsters like Gallup, Rasmussen, Zogby, etc. give mathematical "weighting" to their results based on the percentage of registered Democrats versus the percentage of registered Republicans and Independents. This partially explains the wide variance you find in the polls being released right now. For example, in the last two days, CBS/New York Times has Obama leading by 14 points; while, one of Gallup's polls has Obama's lead down to 3 points. Actually, skewing the polls can be a real form of voter suppression. That's because it can cause depressed support for the weaker candidate who is behind in the polls; resulting in a lower turnout for that person. Also, undecideds and independents can be influenced by big poll numbers for one candidate over another. That's when the psychological impact of "backing the winner" takes over. Nobody really wants to ever back a loser. Polls can "push" the vote to the candidate who is more popular in the polls.

I personally don't think that "walk around" or door-to-door registrations, like those conducted by ACORN, should be allowed. It just lends itself to fraud. A person registering to vote should do so before a duly appointed registration official who has full access to verification data. That's how I registered and how 99 percent of voters register in this country. If ACORN or anyone else wants to get involved in voter registration efforts, they should do so by busing or providing some kind of transport to an authorized registration office, or work to establish remotely setup and authorized registration locations. When you hear that ACORN hires felons and those convicted of identity fraud, you really have to question what is going on. In the case of ACORN, you have to wonder if they have crossed the line into subversive activity.

As always, just my opinion.