...states that some registrations were filled out with the names of the Dallas Cowboys and that there were multiple filings for the same person. If you stop and think about it, however...

1. What would the Democrats gain from this? Registration cards are handed in to state processing agencies which CHECK THEM OUT against data bases before sending voter registration cards out to the voters via mail to the addresses indicated. I don't know how they do it in Nevada but here in New York the envelopes specifically state that the letter containing the registration card is not to be delivered to anyone but the addressee, which means that unless the postman knows that Terrell Owens lives at that address, he won't deliver the card. The idea that "massive fraud" could be accomplished in this manner, as the twits at Investor's Business Daily claim, is absurd.

As for multiple filings, any system worthy of the name checks for these and rejects duplicates. It's not hard to design such a system (I've designed several similar ones myself -- for businesses anxious not to send duplicate mailings to anyone). Again, the idea that somebody is going to get six registration cards and use them to vote repeatedly is nonsense. In every polling place I've ever voted in, you sign a book when you vote, and if you come back and try to vote again, you're already on record and won't be allowed to do so. I don't doubt that some ACORN volunteers may be sloppy and hand in faulty registrations, but that's a far cry from fraud.

Voter fraud, when it's done, always requires the complicity of the election officials on the day of the election. In certain counties in northern New Mexico, where there are often more votes cast than voters registered, the fraud worked because there were so few Republicans in the area that poll watching was often left to the Democrats (or to paid off Republicans).

This works when you have a one-party bailiwick, but in places where both parties have a presence -- a condition which surely defines Nevada -- it is virtually impossible to actually CAST "massive" numbers of fraudulent votes. Voter fraud almost always involves false COUNTING of votes, if only because it's a much more efficient way to do it.

2. On the other hand, the DA in Nevada does have fraudulent registration documents in his hands, so the question is how they got there. In this connection, I find it interesting that this article details the history of a case in which ACORN was accused of fraud and not only was cleared of it, but was declared to have been libelled. My theory is that the Dallas Cowboys' cards were registered by a Republican operative acting undercover, who then outed them to the DA. Crazy, huh? Except that it has happened, hasn't it? It's not as if the Republicans don't have every reason to try some far out shit this year.

Why would the Republicans do this? Two reasons. First of all, in places where their party controls the legal process of registration, they can use it as an excuse to disenfranchise people who ACORN registered legitimately. Secondly, it can be used to justify election day challenges that tie up polling places and lead to some voters -- especially in working class districts where the time available to vote is short -- getting disgusted and leaving.

3. It's not as if the Republicans haven't been claiming voter fraud with virtually NO evidence for many years now. The Republican Party doesn't want poor and working class people to vote -- it's that simple. When they can, they'll throw up barriers that make it difficult for them. The only possible justification for this is voter fraud, and since they've been unable to find real fraud for years now, it seems quite logical to me that they'd go undercover to produce it, and then denounce it.

Hey, the tax cuts of multi-millionaires are at stake here. Anything goes.

Ummm. the_slasher14, your theory is ridiculous. Do you really think that the mail delivery people know who lives at the houses they go to? The mail person delivers the mail, he or she does not knock on the door and ask for two forms of ID. The mailman puts the envelope in the mailbox that it is marked to go to. Does your mailman know you on a first and last name basis? Do you tell him if somebody else moved into your house, or is using your house as their address? Does he ever ask you for ID before dropping off your mail? Do you even ever see your mailman? I'm guessing no. The mailman isn't exactly a trained fraud detector, most mailmen don't even look at the name, just the address ( I know two people who deliver mail, they told me that most of the time they don't even look at the names on the envelopes.) Voter fraud is perhaps the easiest crime ever. Especially with the lax laws that don't even require an ID to vote. The library and video store ask for an ID to open account, but that's just too much to ask for, for somebody to vote.

I takes very little research to note that the extremely infrequent and almost nonexistent voter fraud you are worried about hasn't altered the outcome of an election in fifty years. However, voter suppression techniques (some by officials, but also including the Republican tricks of lying to voters and jamming phone lines -- you know, the stuff people have actually been convicted of) have thwarted the will of the people.

But, you already know that, you are just spitting out the talking points.

The bottom line is that no-one has given any evidence as to how all this could possibly benefit Obama.

If anything, it will result in Democrats turning up at the polls and finding their registration didn't get processed. That's bad, but it's nothing like what the GOP and Fox News are saying.

As for multiple filings, any system worthy of the name checks for these and rejects duplicates. It's not hard to design such a system (I've designed several similar ones myself -- for businesses anxious not to send duplicate mailings to anyone). Again, the idea that somebody is going to get six registration cards and use them to vote repeatedly is nonsense. In every polling place I've ever voted in, you sign a book when you vote, and if you come back and try to vote again, you're already on record and won't be allowed to do so. I don't doubt that some ACORN volunteers may be sloppy and hand in faulty registrations, but that's a far cry from fraud.

So, what if ACORN registers a fraudulently registers bunch of real voters who are already registered in other areas. The real voters are removed from the book were they actually live, and the real voters show up only to discover that they are not registered. The voters might protest or decide it is not worth it and go home.

Since when did the Left love voter suppression so much?

"Since when did the Left love voter suppression so much?"

Obviously it's not "the Left" who are trying to do this, because -- since Acorn focuses on poor people -- it will be Democrat votes that end up being suppressed.

This is fraud on the part of the collectors for extra money, and negligence on the part of Acorn for hiring those collectors, presumably also to make money. Politics has nothing to do with it, unless Acorn is a Republican front trying to suppress the vote of poor people.

I think you are missing the real possibility for problems. Let me explain my thinking.

1) We know that ACORN is paying people to collect registrations.

2) We know that some of these registrations in various locations have been flagged as fraudulent.

3) We know that many of the fraudulent registrations were caught just because they were so poorly done (e.g., names of celebrities, nonexistent addresses, multiple registrations for the same person in the same county) - indicating that at least these ACORN workers were just filling out fraudulent registrations for the money.

Suppose that there are more sophisticated people (ACORN workers or otherwise) are submitting fraudulent registrations with names of real people listing an actual addresses. We wouldn't know about the systematic fraud until after the election as people who thought they were registered find out that they were re-registered on the other side of the state.

How can they be "actual addresses" if they are also fraudulent addresses on the other side of the State?

I guess what you are saying is that Acorn got hold of a Republican voter database somehow, then re-registered all the Republicans with fake addresses. Then the State will process the registrations without checking them, and when the Republicans go to the polls, they will find out they can't vote.

This doesn't strike me as a very likely conspiracy. It is bound to be discovered, even if the bogus registrations managed to get through the system. The people who turn up en masse at the polls and find they can't vote can simply ask for a proxy vote, and their vote will be counted later when it is all sorted out. The management of Acorn would certainly go to jail.

I prefer the simpler explanation that this was lazy employees trying to claim extra hours on the job.

patron002 -- actually I do know my mailman. I live in a rural area and pick up my mail at a PO Box. I always wish Ernie a good day and he wishes me one back. And it is exceedingly rare for ANYTHING to show up in my PO Box that doesn't have my name or my wife's name on it (or, of course, the ubiquitous "occupant" mail). That's partly because Ernie knows my first and last names, and required me to submit photo IDs for myself and my wife when we rented the box.

In other places up here, I've have rural route delivery and there, too, I knew my mailman and I very rarely got mail that wasn't for me. Sometimes I'd get a letter for one of the other mailboxes right next to mine, or sometimes for the previous occupant -- in both cases, the mailman's fingers or focus slipped.

I had a neighbor who once received a letter addressed to "Fast Eddie, Kip House" plus the city and state. Fast Eddie was his nickname; Kip was the name of the guy who built his house back in 1710 or so. Mailmen really DO know their clientele. You ought to try to get to know yours.

When I lived in New York City (about 25 years ago) in an apartment house with around 100 units, my mailbox had my name and my wife's name written on a piece of tape inside the box. And yes, I knew my mailman there, too. And almost never got mail that wasn't mine.

You're assuming that all mail is handled the same. Mail which is marked with something to the effect of "don't deliver to incorrect address" is examined with extra care. This applies to very few documents -- driver's licenses, auto registrations, etc. -- and so the Postal Service handles it differently. If voter registrations AREN'T handled in this manner, it's the fault of the state in question.

Furthermore, since the introduction of the nine-digit zip code around 1986, any organization which sends out a large amount of mail has a data base by now that can identify an address down to the apartment number and can also identify who lives at that nine-digit ZIP for the most part. It is child's play for such a system to figure out that Terrell Owens doesn't match whoever lives at 56 Main St., Apt. 5Q, and to trigger an inquiry (on the off chance that Owens actually DOES live there). And it is also child's play for such a system to identify living units with more than, say, two last names receiving mail there, and to investigate when somebody racked up five or six registrations at one address. States DO have systems like this in place already, because that's how they identify duplicate registrations, which happen quite often for innocent reasons.

Actually, just printing on an envelope the words "address correction requested" will cause the post office to flag mail sent to the wrong address and return it to the sender with the correct address (if obtainable) noted on the envelope. This is done by certain advertisers who are eager to keep track of patrons and also by political campaigns (in the early stages of the campaign) to perfect their mailing lists. There is a charge for this, since it involves extra work for the USPS. I once worked on a campaign where the candidate used envelopes with those words on it -- they were envelopes which he used for a private foundation he ran, where he had an obvious interest in keeping track of donors. You should have seen his face when the Post Office socked him with a bill for several hundred dollars worth of corrections.

But the larger point is that voter registration fraud, while indeed a pain in the ass because state registrars have to spot it and take time to weed it out, has NEVER translated into actual vote fraud AT THE POLLS to any significant degree.

David Iglesias, the New Mexico Federal DA who was fired because he wouldn't push vote fraud indictments during the 2006 election, points out that there simply weren't any winnable cases to present, as agreed by him, by the local FBI office (which did the investigation), and by the Justice Dept. officials following the situation in Washington. I lived in New Mexico for five years -- it used to have some of the most outrageous vote fraud in the country but that was NEVER been accomplished through registration fraud. It's done by controlling the polling places in remote rural areas and reporting fictional numbers. There's a reason for this, of course -- it's a lot cheaper than to have to pay people to collect and use false registrations.

MnZ --

1. You are assuming that all incorrect registrations are the result of political chicanery. The Dallas Cowboys fiasco is certainly a case of a lazy ACORN worker padding his payroll, which means that ACORN is the victim, not any voter or any political party, since this kind of sloppiness always gets caught.

2. Duplicate registrations happen for all kinds of innocent reasons. People sometimes re-register to please the nice young lady who asks them. They sometimes confuse a registration drive with a petition signing drive and think they're actually helping a candidate get on the ballot (since both drives are often done at the same time and place). Any state voter registration system worthy of the 21st century spots these things easily and throws them out.

3. Now, as for your scenario of ACORN workers (or whoever) hijacking legitimate voters' registrations, how exactly do you think that could work? Again, registrations go through the mails. What you're positing is that a Democratic Party operative re-registers hundreds or thousands of people from Westchester County in New York, say, to Harlem, thereby stealing these votes from Republicans to Democrats.

First of all, you have to SIGN a registration form, and the election bureaus have those signatures on record. So for ACORN to do this, it would have to not only fill out the forms, but also forge signatures that it has never seen. And when the first dozen or so Harlem registrations showed up with fishy-looking signatures, the game would be over.

Second, the USPS publishes a list every two weeks of every change of address in the country. Any state system worthy of the name uses this list to identify voters who have left their previous address, both to verify that they re-register at the new one, and to verify that they DON'T vote at the old one. A situation in which large numbers of voters were spotted moving without getting their mail forwarded would set off alarm bells.

In short, your theory of hijacked voters might work on a short-term basis for one or two voters, but never in sufficient numbers to swing an election.

4. Given the ease of detection and the expense of paying actual people to cast fraudulent votes, it's obviously far easier to fix an election by mis-reporting numbers from one-party districts where opposition poll-watchers are not always present, or can be bribed to look the other way. And, in the past, that's how it's been done.

5. On the other hand, it's very, very easy for a single individual willing to be a son-of-a-bitch to charge that some legitimate voters, picked at random, are fraudulent and to tie up the registration place for quite some time until the matter is straightened out. By that time, if it's in a minority district, a certain number of Democratic voters have to go to work, or relieve the baby sitter, or just get disgusted and leave. And THAT is what the whole ACORN flap is probably about -- giving Republican assholes who have done this stuff in the past the excuse they need to try it now.