voter fraud

After weeks of escalating Republican attacks on the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, for alleged voter registration fraud, it turns out the McCain campaign has its own fraud charges to respond to.
The Huffington Post reports that McCain has paid $175,000 to Lincoln Strategy Group, a political consulting group based in Arizona [...]

Possibly to rebut media reports that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and the state’s Republican Party are distancing themselves from the McCain campaign’s recent negativity, Crist put in a quick appearance on a hastily scheduled campaign conference call with reporters this afternoon.
The call, announced two minutes in advance, allowed Crist and Doug Holtz-Eakin, Sen. John McCain’s [...]

Michigan Democrats and Republicans reached a settlement Monday in a lawsuit charging that the Republican Party planned to illegally use lists of foreclosed residents to challenge voters on Election Day. The case was brought based on statements made to a reporter for TWI’s sibling publication, The Michigan Messenger.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a self-described “part think tank, part advocacy group” at the NYU Law School, just held a news conference at the National Press Club on voter suppression.
The presentation was mostly a rehash of now-familiar talking points: minorities are targeted; Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) would be purged if he [...]

So is voter fraud really a problem or not?
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, not answering the question, exactly, but ruling unanimously that the Ohio GOP probably doesn’t have the right to challenge how closely Ohio’s secretary of state scrutinizes new voter registrations.
It was a contentious battle in a hotly contested state that [...]

Charging that the FBI probe of ACORN represents an “unholy alliance” between Republican operatives and potentially illegal conduct by law enforcement targeting voter fraud, the Obama campaign demanded Friday that the U.S. special prosecutor looking into the U.S. attorneys scandal investigate the matter.
General counsel Bob Bauer sent a letter to Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey charging [...]

Over at our sister site The Colorado Independent, Jonathan Kaplan has a great new take on the ACORN controversy.
Kaplan suggests that Sen. John McCain’s voter-fraud charges against ACORN might be motivated by a desire to undermine the legitimacy of an Obama presidency and deter future political participation by African- Americans.

Yesterday, the full Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed a surprising victory to state Republicans by requiring Ohio election officials to check all new voters’ registration information against existing databases by Friday.
As the Associated Press reports, the court, sitting en banc (all 16 judges), reversed the ruling just last week of its own three-judge panel [...]

It’s amazing the vitriol that the community-organizing group ACORN has inspired among the right in this election cycle.
In recent days, the National Review jumped on the bandwagon, referring to the low-income ACORN workers who register new voters as “lazy crackheads” — supposedly quoting another ACORN worker it deemed a “disgruntled felon/inmate/activist.”
Ever since ACORN announced last [...]

With the William Ayers line of attack turning out to be toxic for the McCain campaign, it looks like the Republicans have found a new battle cry — ACORN.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, now clearly the campaign’s chief attack dog, has stopped publicly questioning Sen. Barack Obama’s association with the former Weatherman and is now spotlighting [...]