McCain’s Last Stand

Blocking your vote is now the last, best hope of the McCain/Palin campaign. All of the Republican caterwauling about ACORN is being done to create a climate of uncertainty about the voter registration work this group has done.

They are laying a foundation to either steal the election, or — in the case of their almost certain defeat — to mythologize how they came to lose. For many conservatives, the election of 2024 will be remembered not for the vicious demagoguery at the Palin rally, nor for McCain’s compromise with the Bush base of fundamentalists (the compromise that lost him his own base of independents), perhaps not even for the climate of fear surrounding the Bush recession/depression; but rather the election will be remembered by the losers as the time when some organized outlaw group called ACORN indulged in massive voter registration fraud and stole the election in eleven key states.

Tom Mattzie, in the Huffington Post tells the story better than I can. Quoting a Milwaukee Journal editorial, he says:

Here’s what else you should know about these charges on ACORN’s efforts in about 11 states.

The organization is obligated to turn in every registration card completed, even, as one spokesman put it, if it has the name Daffy Duck on it. The organization says it segregates and flags suspect cards to election authorities. It apparently doesn’t catch all of them. But a vast conspiracy? We’re doubtful. If a worker taking illegal shortcuts fakes a name on a registration card, that act overburdens election officials, but do we really think that the faked person will vote?

Voter registration fraud, when it occurs, is a serious matter, and it’s obvious that even if ACORN is catching many, the number of bad registrations it is turning in points to quality control problems. However, most of the cards submitted, said Milwaukee’s top election official, appear to be good.

If the past is prologue, much of this ballyhoo is really about those new voters and who they might vote for.

Mattzie says, “The best way to deflate the conservative fable is to win with an overwhelming landslide that guarantees there won’t be a dispute of the results.” I see that landslide coming. But until we’ve scored three or four hundred electoral votes, it’s not a done deal.

We’re right up against voter registration deadlines this week. If you’re a recent new registrant, if you’ve moved or this is the first time you’ve voted, you might want to look at Can I Vote dot org (http://canivote.org). The site is sponsored by the National Association of Secretaries of State, the state officials charged with keeping the voting registration records for each state.

If you can’t find your registration via canivote.org, then when you go to the polls, you will want to bring identification and proof of residency. The answer to the question “Can I vote?” is in almost all instances a rousing YES YOU CAN! But the Republicans are doing their best to complicate matters. Remember the hanging chads that got us started on this Republican road to misery eight years ago.

I’d say “Vote early, vote often,” but those neocon a**holes are such a humorless lot.