daverea.com

OK, maybe this one is just too obvious, ripe for dismissal on the grounds that it just makes too much sense to actually consider…

Over the last couple of days (weeks? months?) a political group called ACORN has come under the microscopes of various election officials as well as the major media. Apparently, in their efforts to register oodles and oddles of voters in time for the presidential election (only 22 days until it’s over! Yay!), they’ve managed to submit quite a few fraudulent registrations. Sometimes it’s convicted felons registering to vote. Sometimes it’s little kids who somehow manage to drop a “2″ or “3″ in front of their single-digit ages. Sometimes people register from the grave.

I won’t bother repeating all the gory details here … it’s much more fun to go read Michelle Malkin’s impressively-neutral take on the matter.

ACORN “blamed inefficiency and lack of resources for problems such as being unable to spot duplicate voter-registration cards” – so let’s run it against my super-obvious, way-too-easy litmus test: If ACORN’s intentions are noble – sign people up to vote, no matter what – then why is the fraud only happening in swing states? You’d think it would be happening all over the place, because homeless and low-income folks (ACORN’s target audience) in all 50 states should be getting out to the polls, right? Isn’t this about helping people to exercise their rights?

Maybe the TV talking heads have already talked the “only happening in swing states” idea to death; I don’t have cable and don’t watch much TV anyway. I’m sure someone out there in the blogosphere must have hit on it, but I’ve got more important blogs to watch than the political ones. Besides, the coffee I drink does enough to get me worked up – I don’t need other people’s political rants to push me into stomach ulcer territory!

I only mention this here because it ties in with something I’m going to be writing about soon: simplicity. It’s a simple, easy test – and it would seem to speak volumes about the nobility of ACORN’s intentions. Are they really altruistically trying to “get out the vote” among the underprivileged and undereducated? We’ve got plenty of them here in New York, but you don’t see (or, at least my Google searching doesn’t see) any fraudulent activities here. But The Empire State is solidly in the blue – no need to falsify records to achieve the desired result here. But the so-termed “battleground” states? They’re covered.

If ACORN cared a whit for the people they’ve been “trying” to “help”, there’d be news from more than just swing states. They blame the appearance of – not just a few, not hundreds – thousands of fraudulent voter registrations on inefficiencies and a lack of resources. Wouldn’t it be even worse, then, in states where they commit almost no resources at all? The stories don’t add up, and that usually means someone just failed the litmus test.