October 15, 2008
I don't like some of this ACORN stuff either, but it's small potatoes compared to what Republicans have been doing for decades and to try and link it to Obama is nuts. Registering and voting are two different things. Republicans use the Ken Blackwell method of purging the voting rolls every chance they get. Sometimes they can count on the Supreme Court to do their bidding. Case in point The Indiana Voter ID law....You can hear my Rachel Maddow interview on it here. And what I find really insulting is the idea that Ken Blackwell himself is actually trying to make a case involving Voter fraud. Now that is laughable..
And yes, in case you were curious, that's the same Ken Blackwell who was Ohio's secretary of state in 2004. The same Ken Blackwell who worked himself into infamy by actually directing his office to reject voter registrations based on the weight of the paper used. And yes, the same Ken Blackwell who was embarrassed in 2006, when he lost the race to be his state's governor by 23 percentage points -- but only after his supporters challenged the eligibility of Blackwell's opponent
Steven Rosenfeld writes: California GOP had Same Voter Registration Problems as ACORN in 2006
Faked names on voter registration forms. Error rates as high as 60 percent. Firing the people responsible for these errors. Investigations launched by local and state police. Sound familiar? This is not ACORN in the 2008 election's final days. This is the California Republican Party and its contractors in 2006, when the same problems that are now dogging ACORN and providing political fodder for GOP attacks plagued an effort by California Republicans to register 750,000 people. The details were all spelled out in a series of Los Angeles Times stories, which quoted former California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres saying these kinds of errors are inevitable "when you use private vendors." Even the state's top election official in 2006, Republican Bruce McPherson, was forced to investigate his own party's actions...read on
And Editor & Publisher has a great piece about it and asks: why does it seem to be a greater sin to be suspected of voter registration mistakes than to publicly engage in voter suppression efforts?

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