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California GOP had Same Voter Registration Problems as ACORN in 2006
Faked names on voter registration forms. Error rates as high as 60 percent. Firing the people responsible for these errors. Investigations launched by local and state police. Sound familiar? This is not ACORN in the 2008 election's final days.
This is the California Republican Party and its contractors in 2006, when the same problems that are now dogging ACORN and providing political fodder for GOP attacks plagued an effort by California Republicans to register 750,000 people.
The details were all spelled out in a series of Los Angeles Times stories, which quoted former California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres saying these kinds of errors are inevitable "when you use private vendors." Even the state's top election official in 2006, Republican Bruce McPherson, was forced to investigate his own party's actions.
These same issues surfaced again last week as ACORN, the low-income advocacy organization which ran 2008's largest voter drive apart from political parties with 1.3 million new voters, was hammered by the GOP for submitting falsified voter registrations. The GOP's attacks have increased and even John McCain is saying that ACORN's actions are proof the Democrats are trying to steal the 2008 election.
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The only thing ACORN's errors prove is that mistakes in big voter registration drives are inevitable, no matter who conducts them. When you look at all the other problems in the nation's voting systems -- from poorly designed ballots to electronic machines that lose votes cast -- the larger truth is every aspect of American elections is imperfect.
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But let's put ACORN's errors in perspective. More than 120 million Americans may vote in November. ACORN, which hired 13,000 workers to register 1.3 million voters, had a few bad hires - like any big company.
But unlike the California GOP in its 2006 voter drive, ACORN has a policy of telling local election officials when it believes it has fraudulent registrations. It is required by states to submit all voter applications and urges election officials to prosecute knowing mistakes. The current case against ACORN comes from its own disclosures.
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Last week, the New York Times reported that states using Social Security data to verify and update voter lists found 2.4 million "non-matches" for existing and new voters this year through September. The Social Security Administration says its data can be wrong 28.5 percent of the time when used this way, Wired Magazine reported in September.MORE
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Date: 2008-10-16 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 02:57 am (UTC)months and months of nothing but circus music playing in my head. I won't know whether to laugh or cry until November 5.
they've certainly made it a lot more palatable to settle for Obama in spite of his flaws, with the stark contrast they've managed to cut. I'll give them that.