The Huffington Post reports that McCain has paid $175,000 to Lincoln Strategy Group, a political consulting group based in Arizona and run by Republican operative Nathan Sproul, who’s been accused of voter registration fraud in several states — in the form of throwing away Democratic registration forms and suppressing Democratic voter turnout.

HuffPost also reports that the Republican National Committee separately paid Lincoln Strategy another $37,000 to register voters for this election. Sproul, meanwhile, has donated nearly $30,000 to the McCain campaign. He’s also a former leader of the Arizona Republican Party and of the state’s Christian Coalition.

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 that had said that the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) does not require states to match all new voters’ data. The Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brummer, had said that matching all such data would be far too difficult to complete before Election Day.

The Ohio ruling is the latest in a series of cases around the country disputing what HAVA requires. Republicans in Florida, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere have maintained that states must verify all new voter registration information against new state databases that were mandated by law. Only if the information matches should the voter’s vote count.

Democrats and voting-rights advocates, on the other hand, have insisted that such a rule is not mandated by HAVA, and would disenfranchise tens of thousands of people in each state, because typos, nick-names, name changes and other technical problems with the data frequently prevent the matching of legitimate voters’ identifying information.

In Florida, for example, some 20,000 voters were prevented or delayed from voting in 2006 because of matching problems.

Given the close race in Ohio, whether all votes are counted could make all the difference.

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 week it had signed up 1.3 million new voters, many of whom are expected to lean Democratic, the Republicans have stepped up their attacks. But the nasty tone, twisted facts and outright falsehoods about the group — and Sen. Barack Obama’s connections to it — have become astounding.

True, ACORN workers have been found to have turned in hundreds of unusable, false or even laughable voter registration forms, apparently in an effort to earn some easy money. Then again, out of 1.3 million forms, some are bound to be bad. Though there’s no evidence any of the faulty forms can be used to actually commit voter fraud, media outlets from Fox to CNN to the National Review seem intent on painting the group as trying to steal the presidential election.

The latest claims from the McCain campaign, distributed via flyers at a McCain rally, are that ACORN got $500 million in the recently-approved bailout bill -– a claim that’s patently false. While there was discussion of providing money in the bill to a new agency that helps fund construction of low-income housing, the National Housing Trust Fund — created last summer by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush — that provision didn’t survive, and it had nothing to do with ACORN. (ACORN doesn’t build housing.)

But maybe the strangest revelation of all is the one about McCain’s connections with ACORN: McCain was a keynote speaker at the group’s Immigration Rally in Miami in 2006.

So I guess McCain was for ACORN before he was against it?

Consider the following example from Lake County, IN., which many critics of ACORN have pointed to as a case of voter fraud:

As you can see, canvasser Dain T. submitted the form for a certain Jimmy Johns, who turned out not to be a voter but a sandwich shop.

His supervisor, Latisha Hicks, suspected something fishy, investigated the matter and had Dain T. fired for falsification. According to ACORN, he was then turned over to election officials for prosecution.

This would appear to cut against assertions by some GOP officials that ACORN intentionally, or negligently, filed false registrations.

Sometimes, upon investigation, the supervisor determined that there was no wrongdoing. In the example below, Hicks determined that although the handwriting on several voter registration forms was similar, it was not similar enough to warrant suspicion.

UPDATE 10/15: The folks at ACORN initially gave me these forms without the names blacked out. After consulting their lawyers, they sent me these blacked-out forms and asked me to substitute them in. I obliged.

In a conference call with reporters just completed, Obama campaign general counsel Bob Bauer did it again, calling the GOP case against ACORN “ludicrous” and then denying any connection between the campaign and the organization.

“We have our own registration effort,” he said. He disputed news reports that the Obama campaign has given $800,000 to ACORN.

“We have never paid ACORN a penny for registration purposes,” he insisted. “It’s simply not true.”

This morning, I asked ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan how he felt about Obama’s disavowal of his organization since the voter-fraud controversy erupted.

He dodged that question, simply saying that ACORN is nonpartisan and functions independently of any campaign.

But I’d imagine that ACORN people must be frustrated to find themselves attacked from the right and abandoned by the left.

As The Washington Post reported, the Nevada chapter of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, had planned a potluck dinner at its Las Vegas office Tuesday night to celebrate the 80,000 newly registered voters its staff had signed up in Clark County.

Before that dinner could start, however, Nevada officials raided the ACORN office, removing 20 boxes of documents and eight computer hard drives. The state officials claimed that workers for the community-organizing group, who are paid by the hour, had submitted almost 300 voter registration cards that included names and addresses that don’t exist in Nevada, or are duplicates of previous registrations.

A former ACORN employee said she started making up names to fill out the registration forms to avoid having to work in the heat outside. Workers are expected to sign up 20 new voters per shift.

As I noted in my post yesterday, Republicans have been aggressively attacking ACORN for alleged voter fraud, and using any false or erroneous registrations submitted by the group to claim there’s a problem of widespread voter fraud that’s tainting the elections.

But not only are the numbers of illegitimate registrations found tiny in comparison to the 1.3 million valid new registrations the group has signed up, but neither the Nevada GOP, nor anyone else, has presented any evidence that these duplicate or false registrations have any impact whatsoever on the validity of the vote.

After all, unless poll workers are sleeping on the job, no one can show up and vote twice. And there’s no evidence, and likewise no charges, that anyone is showing up at the polls and impersonating the nonexistent voters that have been signed up.

Still, ACORN has been making huge efforts to try to prevent this sort of fraud — cooperating with local authorities by flagging suspicious registrations and having workers individually call new registrants to make sure their registrations are legitimate.

Of course, the group has good reason to cooperate with local authorities to prevent fraud. After all, even assuming the Republicans’ allegations against ACORN workers are true, the only fraud that’s actually been perpetrated was on ACORN itself -– not on the government or the voters of Nevada, or anywhere else.

On to Florida (flickr)

The town-hall style presidential debate is over, the swords — for the moment — withdrawn.

For most of the evening at Belmont University in Nashville, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain attacked each other over domestic spending, foreign affairs and the best way to emerge from the cloak of economic darkness. They exchanged awkward, forced pleasantries with each other and the wives and said good night and good luck to Tom Brokaw, the debate moderator. Now it was time for both men to look elsewhere — particularly south to Florida and the 130-mile ribbon of highway known as Interstate 4.

Yes, the debate was important. But it was mere Tennessee shadow boxing, a preview of what’s to happen on the battleground known as Florida’s I-4 corridor. This is where the real fight will take place.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

That’s because the I-4 corridor may be the most important political real estate in the nation. Running through Tampa, Lakeland, Daytona Beach and Orlando, the corridor holds the key to the biggest chunk of independent voters in the biggest of all battleground states. These voters’ anxieties, fears and financial troubles have suddenly pushed the junior senator from Illinois ahead of his Republican rival in the polls here — by anywhere between five and seven percentage points. For now.

Rest assured that McCain will be in Florida soon enough. Because he, like Obama, knows I-4 is the road a candidate must travel to become president of the United States.

“It is the battleground,” the Orlando-based Democratic strategist Jim Kitchens said of the corridor. “It is ground zero.”

Much of the country has an outdated view of Florida and where its power lies. For so many, Florida means Miami, which Joan Didion once aptly described as “not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility would be accommodated.” It’s a view so persuasive that when Tina Fey, playing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in her latest “Saturday Night Live” skit, pandered to Florida, she said, “From a very young age, my two greatest loves were always Jews and Cuban food.”

The truth is that Florida is a far more complicated state, where constituencies and their concerns are evolving and morphing. It is a boom state gone bust. Beneath its white-hot sky, our national angst seems magnified, because here is where everything was supposed to be sunshine, supposed to go right.

But it all seems askew. Annually beset by hurricanes, home insurance rates have rocketed. The real estate crash that bruised so much of the country pummeled Florida, taking away thousands of jobs. The high price of gasoline helped kill thousands of pilgrimages of the young and old to the state’s vacation meccas– from DisneyWorld to Boca. Stories of people leaving — repeat leaving — the state have begun to pop up in local newspapers. The elderly have become anxious about what assets they will have in their golden years.

“We are really hurting down here,” said Richard Scher, a professor of political science at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “I’ve lived here a long time — 30 years — and I’ve never seen this state so anxious, so apprehensive, and it’s all economically based. The perception is that Mr. Obama has spoken more directly to these concerns than Mr. McCain has at this point.”

Flickr: Sylvar

When asked how things were going in the state, the Florida pollster Jim Kane — whose most recent study had Obama leading McCain by seven percentage points — said, “Badly.”

“Because it was a boom state,” Kane said, “we were at the peak of the housing bubble and [when it popped] that really devastated Florida. The other day, I talked to a realtor who hasn’t sold a house in two years — and that’s not atypical. Before, she was selling three houses a week. We had a four-to-five-year run during which you couldn’t not make money buying something in real estate.”

It’s been conventional wisdom that to know Florida, you must start with two groups: the elderly and Miami’s Cuban population. Both have been misunderstood. As Susan MacManus, a professor of political science at the University of South Florida in Tampa, explained, among registered independent voters, those older than 65 make up 23.6 percent of the voting pool.

And those 35 and under? 25.3 percent.

That statistic debunks the notion that the state is controlled by retirees.

So Florida is a study in true electoral power — in how a candidate can appeal best to two different demographic groups with seemingly little in common.

Moreover, many outside observers continue to overestimate the influence of the Cuban population. The fact is that Cubans represent four percent to six percent of Florida’s voting population. They are no longer even the largest Latino group in the state. While many older Cuban-Americans still reliably vote Republican, the Puerto Ricans who live along the I-4 corridor, and vote Democratic, have all but neutralized the perceived Cuban influence in the state.

Even among the Cubans in Miami, old Cold War sentiments and hatred of all things Democratic — because of JFK’s actions, or inaction, at the Bay of Pigs — have finally begun to fall away into history.

“They still play an important role, but their role is changing,” said Wayne Smith, who served as executive secretary of President Kennedy’s Latin American Task Force and as chief of mission in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. He is now director of the Center for International Policy’s Cuba Program.

“Partially, it’s generational,” he said. “The hard hard-liners are the ones who have been here the longest, and they’ll always vote Republican.

“But then you have the younger generation, born in the United States, and those who came in the 1980s, who just aren’t like that. I think Obama has a good chance of winning Florida, in part, because of this.”

Indeed, the city Cubans have culturally loomed over doesn’t loom over the rest of the state. As far as media markets are concerned, Miami ranks third behind Tampa and Orlando — two cornerstones of the I-4 corridor. These are cities that, in Florida’s business-friendly environment, have been able to attract people from other parts of the country who have no ties to the old political allegiances that once defined Florida. They tend to be younger, college educated and more likely to consider themselves independents.

“Who wins the middle,” said David Beattie, a veteran Florida Democratic strategist, “is the one who wins the state.”

How a presidential candidate could do this appears more obvious with each passing day. If there is one issue that cuts across Florida, it is the economic reckoning of the past two weeks. The young professionals who fostered growth along the I-4 corridor find themselves beset with angst over their prosperity and the future of their children. The elderly wonder if their investments and savings can keep them afloat in retirement. The thousands of college students who the Obama campaign has targeted, at places like the University of Florida and Florida State, are gripped with fears about a life after college with no prospects for work.

There’s no question who has and hasn’t benefited from such angst. While McCain bumbled his way in the early days of the crisis, Obama emerged as the man of reason, the level-headed man of intellect when intellect, not folksiness, was needed.

Of course Obama’s been helped by the fact that Florida is controlled by a Republican legislature and governor, and the state population now takes a dim view — surprise — of President George W. Bush. Nor, says Scher, have the personal attacks leveled against Obama, particularly by Palin in recent days, reached the right target.

“Having watched politics here for more than three decades, I can say the independents like their politics fairly bland,” Scher said. “One could say the politics of the state is pretty bland. We don’t usually choose ideological candidates. I have never seen Floridians who look approvingly at gutter politics. That doesn’t play well in this state. I don’t know who’s advising McCain, but I think he’s got the culture of the state all wrong.”

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, seems to have captured it just right. If Florida, in its geographic size and racial diversity, can be seen as a microcosm of the country, then you can truthfully say the campaign has run a mini-version of their national plan.

As it has done in nearly every state, the Obama campaign has, in Beattie’s words, run a “spread offense,” flooding the state with field offices and paid staffers. Further, they’ve done well with voter registration in sich African-American strongholds as Jacksonville. An aggressive voter-registration drive yielded 415,580 new voters as of the beginning of last month, double the number the Republicans signed up. Outreach efforts have even been made in the staunchly Republican panhandle, the one part of the state culturally tied to the South.

“What the goal has been is to cut margins in places like that,” said Kitchens. “If you only get beat 54 to 46, as opposed to 60 to 40, that’s a huge difference.”

But this is not a state McCain can afford to concede — unlike Michigan. It has the fourth largest number of electoral votes, behind solidly blue California and New York, and the burning-red Texas. When McCain effectively abandoned Michigan last week, some reports cited the move as a response to Obama’s surge in Florida.

“The path to winning the presidency for any Republican is not a path that includes losing Florida,” Beattie said. “It is a must win for McCain.”

Yet the old soldier has reason for hope. Because there’s no question the race in Florida will remain close. Florida is not a state you can break open. Not when it has roughly 20 military bases and a large number of veterans who believe in everything McCain stands for. Not when it has a sizable evangelical base now energized by Palin.

“It’ll still be the battleground people predicted it to be,” said MacManus of the University of South Florida. “The lead has changed so many times I think you predict at your own peril.”

Starting today, Obama and McCain again go their separate ways. But one can expect that both nominees must, at some point, travel that same Southern terrain — shuttling among Orlando and Tampa and Lakeland, seeking to convince those struggling in the the fading prosperity of the I-4 corridor that he is the one who can best help their plight. That he has the answers.

By Nov. 4, it may be a well-traveled corridor whose constituents could have tired of the attention. But their ultimate choice might very well decide who takes the White House.

When the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, announced yesterday that it had registered more than 1.3 million new voters nationwide so far this year, it was a cause either for celebration or dismay — depending on where you stand.

In theory, of course, voter registration is supposed to be a good thing, and ACORN has long been commended for its ability to effectively appeal to young, poor, working class, elderly and minority voters around the country.

But this set of community organizers is also a favorite target of the Republican Party and, most recently, of Fox News. As the Huffington Post recently reported, Fox has been hammering Obama’s alleged connections with the community-organizing group -– much as if it were charging that he’s consorting with terrorists. (Leave it to Gov. Sarah Palin to make Fox look restrained.)

But ACORN? When did grass-roots organizers trying to increase political participation through voter registration become something political candidates had to distance themselves from?

It all started with the GOP’s accusations that ACORN promotes voter fraud — a charge it’s been making for years but which it’s stepped up this campaign season with a vengeance.

Readers even cited the charges in commenting on my last story, which was about how actual voter fraud -– the kind that affects elections -– doesn’t really exist.

What the voter fraud fear-mongers neglect to mention, however, is that in most cases, the charges against ACORN have not been substantiated. Which means there’s no reason to believe they were ever true.

As we know from the U.S. attorney firing scandal under Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales, chief prosecutors are not above pressuring their underlings to go after voter fraud that doesn’t exist.

But the most important reason why the unsubstantiated charges against ACORN are misleading is that even in the few cases where it turned out that people were wrongly registered, there is no evidence that anyone actually turned up on Election Day to vote on their behalf.

A voter registration may be invalid because someone signing up accidentally provided a wrong address or phone number; or because a worker provided false information.

But in the cases cited as evidence of voter fraud by ACORN -– most notably one cited as the worst case of voter fraud in the state of Washington, where seven people were convicted last year –- the prosecutor himself noted that it was a scheme by a few individuals to make money. No one was actually trying to influence the outcome of the election.

It turned out that workers who were paid to register voters had copied names out of phone books rather than going out and doing their jobs of signing up real voters. Of course, none of those people showed up to vote.

Seeking to prevent any more such scandals, ACORN officials told me the organization now has workers personally call each newly-registered voter to double-check that the registration is genuine. That’s a big workload for a non-profit organization run on a shoestring, but it became a necessary effort to fend off the relentless Republican attacks.

Still, it hasn’t stopped them. An announcer on “Fox and Friends” recently described ACORN as having “a long and storied past involving voter fraud across the country, widespread” and noted “Obama’s long-term relationship with the radical group.”

In fact, Obama was one of several lawyers representing a large group of organizations—all siding with the U.S. Dept. of Justice -– who sued the governor of Illinois for failing to follow the federal motor-voter law.

Not surprisingly, Fox, like the GOP operatives attacking ACORN, neglected to tell its audience the rest of the story.

Obama’s web team whipped up a frenzy this week with an edgy YouTube video imagining a victory by Sen. John McCain. They used archival footage of Tom Brokaw announcing the news, and the video climbed to the top of YouTube — besting celebrities, SNL clips and the Sarah Palin montages that dominate political hits at the web site. But this afternoon, NBC stripped the video off the web by filing a copyright claim with YouTube.

It’s a setback for Obama’s field program, which has used viral organizing to register and mobilize new voters.  The video promoted a dedicated voter portal, VoteforChange.com, that helps people register to vote.

It’s also bad time because there are only five days until the registration deadlines in the key states of Colorado, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia.

Since 2006, Democrats have beat Republicans in new registrants by about 13,000 Nevadans. That’s a big shift for a swing state typically decided by narrow margins — for example, Nevada re-elected Bush by a slim 21,000 votes.

The gains are not confined to Democratic strongholds, either, like the urban Clark County. The Reno Gazette-Journal reports that Democratic registration is even spiking in Washoe County, a light red slice of western Nevada:

Washoe County Democrats are closing in on registered Republicans as the parties focus on the Nevada’s battleground county in the presidential election. On Thursday, county Voter Registrar Dan Burk said Republicans had 87,971 registered and Democrats 84,705, with a backlog of more than 5,000 registration applications awaiting processing…. Chris Wicker, chairman of the Washoe County Democratic Party, said the presidential race could be decided in several swing counties like Washoe in several battleground states. Washoe is considered the swing county in Nevada because Clark is heavily Democratic and the rural counties are predominantly Republican…

Burk said his staff is working overtime to process the 5,000 applications before early voting begins Oct. 18. He also has hired 15 temporary employees and plans to add five more by the end of the week.

“Unlike any time I have seen in 30 years of doing this, there is a really aggressive move from one party,” Burk said. “It’s really unusual to see this intense growth in such a short period of time.” Demand for voter registration forms is growing said Burk, who ordered 11,000 two weeks ago and has 3,000 left. He has ordered and additional 15,000…. (emphasis added)

The traditional way to flip a state is persuasion, of course. Which is why there are so many bland ads targeting undecided voters. It is hard to turn a state by registering new voters, rather than converting old ones. But it looks like Obama’s ground game is already having a big effect in Nevada.