PrintOctober 24, 2008
New York Times can't bring itself to name ACORN in its headline on voter fraud story
So now the Times has to own up to the fact that its dismissive attitude towards criticism of ACORN was wrong.
Why does The Times refer to a "Group"; by now, its readers are surely familiar with the "group's" name: ACORN.
Will the Times own up to the fact that it was also wrong regarding the extent of the ties between Barack Obama and ACORN, which it also dismissed as so much piffle? The fact that the campaign funneled over $800,000 dollars to a corrupt group that has engaged in massive voter fraud, that illegally used get out the vote efforts for partisan purposes, that Barack Obama had ACORN as a client, that Barack Obama trained ACORN (though his campaign peddled the deceptive line that he was not ever "hired" as a trainer. True-he thought so highly of the group he trained them for free).
How effective was his training and his campaign's efforts to monitor their money when such a huge percentage of their registrations were deemed invalid? When ACORN inflated its figures, why did it take people like John Fund and other conservatives to illuminate this fraud.
Will these actions be further explored by the Times or can we expect more of a pox on all houses approach-shown by the article's mention of a relatively small problem involving the Republican party of California and voter registration efforts.
Nearly one in three registrations gathered by ACORN were outright frauds. But Republicans are crazy to worry about something like this? One wonders what would cause the New York Times to become concerned about voter fraud at all.On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.
The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.
In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly.
