CNN’s Misleading Report on ACORN

Anyone watching CNN last night might have thought that ACORN (Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is trying to steal the upcoming presidential election for the Democrats.

“ACORN accused of voter fraud” read last night’s CNN headline. Then anchor Campbell Brown gravely presented the results of the cable channel’s “special investigative unit.”

It’s not exactly a tribute to CNN’s investigative team that it was able to come up with a set of allegations against ACORN.

As I reported two days ago, the Republican attorney general in Nevada conducted a high-profile raid on the community organizing group’s headquarters in Las Vegas. Twenty boxes of documents and eight computer drives were seized.

Months before that, Republicans were regularly claiming that ACORN, which aims to register mostly low-income and minority voters, is trying to steal the presidential election for Sen. Barack Obama.

Now, the GOP is widely distributing the YouTube clip of last night’s CNN show, under the Banner headline, “CNN Exposes How ACORN Steals Votes & Ties to Obama”.

Once again, CNN and the Republican operatives neglect to mention this: Even if thousands of ACORN workers register thousands of non-existent voters simply to make a quick buck — and the evidence points to that as the workers’ motive — those non-existent people are NOT showing up to vote on election day.

The fraud, then, is on ACORN, who pays these workers, not on the electoral process or on the American people, as the Republicans want you to believe.

The Republicans have two goals in going after ACORN.

One, they want to tar Obama because his campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN to support its massive voter-registration drive. Given ACORN’s reach around the country with potential Democratic voters, that’s not surprising. (The Obama campaign now says it’s no longer supporting ACORN’s efforts.)

And, with the help of CNN, they want to play the guilt-by-association card. Years ago, Obama was on a team of lawyers that represented ACORN, among others, in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois for refusing to implement the federal motor-voter law. Obama and ACORN won the case.

The Bush administration’s Justice Department sided with ACORN (and Obama) in that case, so I guess it is guilty of trying to steal the election for the Democrats too?

It’s not surprising that the Republican Party would try to smear Obama by attacking a community organizing group that specializes in registering low-income voters.

But CNN’s “investigative team” ought to do a little of its own investigating before it buys into the Republican’s claims of “voter fraud” and suggests that community groups are trying to steal the election for the Democrats.