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ACORN Digging

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 18, 2008

Former U.S. Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, two old lions of the Republican Party, recently have re-emerged on the national scene saying they want to promote "public confidence in the outcome" of the Nov. 4 election.

The two have held two national telephone conferences with reporters. They've appeared at the National Press Club and jointly authored commentaries for newspaper opinion pages. Their message: "Every qualified citizen has an honest and transparent opportunity to vote that is free of intimidation," and there should be no "'stuffing the ballot box' with votes obtained by fraud."

Ordinarily, involvement by these two party statesmen, beacons of integrity in their long Senate careers, would be a welcome development.

But independent voters can be forgiven for wondering whether their good reputations are being misused for base partisan purposes. Danforth and Rudman arrived on the scene just as the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain began a curious and deeply cynical attack on the voter registration efforts conducted by the liberal community activist organization ACORN.

Demonizing ACORN was the central GOP theme in 2004, just as it is now.

To be sure, some ACORN voter registration drives have had problems, mostly centering on registration forms filled out with phony names. In almost all instances, including a case in St. Louis, election authorities - alerted by ACORN managers - have caught the problem.

ACORN's efforts have been the subject of intense, continuous scrutiny for years. Despite such scrutiny, and even with ACORN flagging suspicious applications as required by state election rules, a few reports of bogus registrations still pop up.

That's unfortunate, but it hardly is the "nightmare scenario" the GOP message machine has been chanting to its base. And any evidence of actual voter fraud - phony voters casting votes - has been tellingly absent.

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