Archive for the ‘Voter Fraud’ Category

ACORN Fraud

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

I was perusing this ABC News article that offers a defense of ACORN, and a lot of things didn’t sit right with me about it. And indeed, an hour or two later I saw that Terry Trippany, CEO chief cook and bottle-washer of our parent site Webloggin and contributing writer to Newsbusters, shredded the hell out of it.

His three findings:

1. The “experts” named in the article are just as problematic as you would expect. Ekspurts usually are. You wouldn’t trust a complete stranger to assure you a restaurant is okay after it reopened in the wake of a closure by your health board. Why would you trust a complete stranger to assure you of the purity of anything else? But that’s a generalization. Trippany has details. Read up.

2. A political science professor makes the claim that none of the illegal ballots have been cast by people fraudulently registered to vote. Or, anyway, that none researched, have been found to be cast by such people. Her statement presumes that she’s been engaged in a process that would find such problems, which she doesn’t come out and say. She provides no reassurances that she’s been looking too hard, either. And since she’s an Obama/Biden donor, this is far from persuasive.

3. A singularity is used to prove a negative with regard to a more broadly occurring pattern: “…a Republican prosecutor handling a key Acorn registration fraud case has said there’s no evidence indicating the group was involved in vote fraud.” That’s simply bad logic. Old TV shows are in black and white; penguins are black and white; therefore, penguins are old TV shows.

It is both indefensible and unprofessional to use an Obama campaign contributor without attribution as an expert in a news article to dispute John McCain.
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For a more honest assessment of ACORN and I suggest Stanley Kurtz and Jim Hoft. ABC news clearly can’t be counted on to objectively report their activities. [emphasis mine]

Well hey. They wouldn’t be resorting to this kind of propaganda if it didn’t work.

Meanwhile, I had a couple of other objections to the ABC News piece. The article repeatedly makes assurances that there’s nothing to worry about, based on efforts by the Justice Department that are presumed to be effective and energetic…not outwardly qualified that way…and generating lackluster results within a specific scope.

“This stuff does not threaten the outcome of the election,” said [political science professor Lorraine] Minnite. “How many illegal ballots have been cast by people who are fraudulently registered to vote? By my count, it’s zero. I just don’t know of any, I’ve been looking for years for this stuff.”

For all types of vote tampering and fraud, including vote buying, Minnite says the Justice Department has averaged seven or eight convictions a year.

I’m amazed and impressed that this is a convincing argument, for some of us. I wonder if they so casually accepted this “can’t find it here” kind of logic with regard to that other issue…waterboarding? We ain’t been doing it lately, so just quit worrying about it?

My other objection has to do with ACORN acting as an unbrella organization, with both a voter registration wing and a political activities wing. They’ve endorsed Obama officially; they’re federally funded; they’re eyeball deep in scandal and from the looks of it, deserve to be. Worse still, as you chase down these links you find some of them disappear. Someone’s protesting they have nothing to hide while, simultaneously, doing a splendid job of behaving as if they do.

And then there’s the matter of “registration drives” in general. It is a solution in search of a problem. This country does not have a shortage of energized, motivated voters. It has a sickening, suffocating abundance. There is no reason whatsoever to allow any linkage between public funding, and voter registration drives — no reason at all not to require that all such drives be one hundred percent self-reliant and privately supported. It’s simply not a valid expense to present to the overburdened taxpayer right now.

In fact, I’m unsold on the idea of allowing them at all, even if they are privately funded. Voter pruning drives are more what we need. I say, don’t filter out the left-wingers and don’t filter out the right-wingers — both of those would be clearly wrong — but do make everyone take my voter test before they walk into that booth.

I’m just sayin’. We have a fairly consistent pattern of presuming certain ideas are illegitimate and unsuitable for consideration, just because we don’t hear anyone saying ’em out loud, or read of anyone writing them down. So I’m writing it down: TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE VOTING. It’s more than legitimate to say we have people voting who shouldn’t be, because they’re just too ignorant. It’s way more than legitimate to say that. It is central to all the problems we’ve been having for the last generation or two…or three or four.

As a democratic republic, this nation relies on the presumption that the people who make decisions within it, know what they’re doing. It’s past high time we took some steps to make sure that’s the case. Don’t go arguing with me about that, and then claiming you love the country and want to see it prosper. The country’s drowning under a deluge of stupid voters…many of whom it seems don’t even exist.

Cross-posted at Cassy Fiano and at Right Wing News.