Why the GOP Is Nuts About ACORN

What explains the Republicans' fixation on ACORN in recent days? From Sen. McCain's campaign manager to GOP luminaries to the McCain campaign's own new web ad, ACORN appears to be target # 1 of the GOP campaign against Senator Obama, surpassing even a focus on William Ayers. The claims are that ACORN is engaging in massive voter fraud through its voter registration activities, and -- according to the new web ad -- that the group forced banks to take on risky loans that have led to the country's financial crisis. Though at first glance it may look like this is about tying Senator Obama to a group that has been under investigation for its voter registration activities, the real point appears to be part of a broader Republican strategy to remove likely Democratic voters from the voter rolls and to lay the groundwork to contest the outcome of the presidential election in the event of an extremely close result in a battleground state.

Let's start with the direct Obama connection. The McCain campaign is trying to associate the campaign with ACORN's questionable activities, in the same kind of guilt-by-association claims made about William Ayers and Obama "palling around with terrorists." It is a nice bonus that ACORN has been involved in housing issues as well, as it is a chance to deflect attention from the Bush Administration's handling of economic issues and placing blame on a convenient scapegoat. (Next we will learn that ACORN invented financial derivatives.)

With the polls showing the McCain campaign consistently lagging, it is raising the ACORN issue among others to see if it sticks.

But we should resist the temptation to chalk up this ACORN obsession to just another guilt-by-association campaign tactic. For the last three elections, Republicans have been ramping up cries of voter fraud as a way of undermining the legitimacy of the election results should they not turn out in their favor and providing a reason for strict voting purges that are likely to remove many Democratic voters from the rolls.

We saw the voter fraud call in 2004, when Republicans virtually guaranteed that they would have challenged the presidential election results if John Kerry won and the results turned on the outcome in New Mexico, which Republicans said was rife with voter fraud. (Don't forget that this unsubstantiated concern drove the U.S. attorneys scandal.) We saw it with the activities of the American Center for Voting Rights, a Republican-aligned group that promoted the unsubstantiated claims of impersonation voter fraud in an often-successful effort to enact voter identification laws. We see it now with the reissuance of John Fund's book, Stealing Elections, full of anecdote but virtually no evidence of systematic voter fraud that can lead to a change in the outcome of elections. (The kind of fraud that leads to changes in election outcomes has been with absentee votes, which have mostly been ignored in these efforts.) And just try doing a Google News search for the term "voter fraud." You will see people who believe that foreign money is flooding the Obama campaign, that Obama is not a natural born citizen, and that the election will be stolen through voter fraud.

This is the reason that the ACORN controversy is a godsend to the Republicans. It fits into their meme that the election of Obama would be illegitimate and procured by fraud.

ACORN has been very active in registering voters, especially in big cities and in battleground states. It hires low income workers to do the registration (part of a way of providing additional employment for these workers), and there have been numerous documented cases of ACORN workers turning in fraudulent registration forms. These problems have led to convictions and new investigations -- -including a raid earlier this week in Nevada (which, by the way, has a Democratic Secretary of State).