Last night's edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs This Week featured another dispatch from Drew Griffin on the controversy surrounding voter registration forms submitted by ACORN in Lake County, IN. And as he did in his report last Thursday, Griffin omits two crucial bits of information:
1) according to ACORN, they are required by Indiana law to submit all registration forms they receive, and 2) before submitting those problematic forms, the organization itself flagged them as incomplete or "suspicious."
Unlike Griffin's previous report, he uses the correct terminology -- "voter registration fraud" -- to describe what appears to have happened in Lake County. Dobbs' producers, however, don't seem to have gotten the memo. Throughout the segment, the chryon reads that ACORN is accused of "election fraud," and at one point Dobbs says, "How can there be any doubt about what's at work here?" -- suggesting that there's some broader conspiracy afoot. Watch it:
Notice how at the outset, Griffin reports that "every single one" of the first 2,100 applications were found to be "fraudulent" by the board of elections staff. He goes on to say that the remaining 2,900 forms have been set aside for the time being.
Now, read this bit of reporting from Adam's post on Friday:
According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. "It's certainly true. They [ACORN] did have three batches separated." she told me this morning. "There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info -- like no voter ID number or a missing birthday -- and another batch they called 'suspicious.' "
Gee, I wonder if the Lake Co. staff started processing the ACORN forms by going through the pile identified by the organization itself as "suspicious." That would certainly explain why "every single one" was found to be problematic.
Of course, a viewer could never figure that out because Griffin never informs them that ACORN delivered the forms in three batches.
Let's be clear: 2,100 bad registrations out of 5,000 total is embarassing and I know for a fact that ACORN headquarters is extremely unhappy with the situation in Lake County. That being said, with a nationwide voter registration drive, these types of problems are going to occur. From a recent ACORN press release:
In order to help 1.3 million people register to vote, we hired more than 13,000 registration assistance workers [nationwide]. As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer.
This is about individual employees taking advantage of their employer. In doing so, they broke the law and greatly inconvenienced elections officials. But it's not part of some grand plan by the organization to steal the election.
UnPoliticallyCorrect2008 (not verified) on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 09:24
Are you seriously attempting to say that just because these fraudlant forms have not YET resulted in voter fraud that we should dismiss the actions committed by these employees?
Let us look at it this way-If you were to walk into a store and become injured by an employee whom was NOT performing his/her job properly, would you then sue the store, the employee or possibly both?
You mean to tell me you would NOT find the store, in this case ACORN, wrong for the action its employee committed?
PLEASE........ACORN has been found guilty of this MANY times and was told by the state of Washington as part of their agreement when ACORN had to pay $25,000 in fines for their actions, that they would be monitored to ensure this does not take place again.
You know, I would get if this took place in only one county, or even one state, but MULTIPLE counties and in MULTIPLE states, coincidently the states Obama needs to win in order to win the election----
I guess the $800,000 he gave ACORN is paying off----huh?