Is Voter Fraud "Undermining the Fabric of our Democracy?"

In the last debate, Sen. John McCain's answer appears to have been yes. Republicans are up in arms over what they say is the potential for widespread "voter fraud," most evidenced by the activities of ACORN. The ACORN acronym has been thrown around in this election nearly as much as the name of Bill Ayers, but I doubt most Americans have taken the time to really find out what's going on. In truth, voter fraud is extremely rare in this country these days. What ACORN committed was voter registration fraud, which sounds the same but is extremely different in degree.

When Republicans say "voter fraud," they seem to be referring to some of the old-style techniques commonly thought to have been employed by the old political machines. Tammany Hall, the rulers of 1800s New York, used to take drunks off the street, dress them up nicely, and take them around from polling place to polling place, gradually changing their appearance as they went. This was before photo ID. You'll also often hear that President Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in 1960 because the Daley machine in Chicago counted votes from dead people. This is probably false, though it seems to have permanently entered American political lore (when Republicans accuse Obama of being a "Chicago politician," people are supposed to remember this). The key in both of these scenarios is that they involve people actually voting when they aren't supposed to.

ACORN stands for the American Community Organizations for Reform Now (Yes, Rudy, community organizers). It was founded in 1970 and since then has been an advocate and lobbying group for poor Americans. One of its many objectives is to register as many of the poor as possible to vote. In this particular election, what has come to light is that ACORN tried to accomplish two things at once by paying low-income individuals to register other low-income individuals. Unfortunately, in order to meet their quotas, some of these workers seem to have simply made up names and filled out the forms for those imaginary people. Some of these were extremely obvious frauds, such as "Batman" or "Tony Romo".

Now, this is of course illegal. ACORN immediately admitted that they had no good way of filtering out all of the fakes, since they're not the government, but also refused to simply throw out all the applications. So some fakes probably slipped through the cracks and actually ended up registered. But here's the thing: for this fraud to even start having an effect on the election, the fake people have to actually show up and vote. They have to show ID. Now, you can certainly fake an ID (just ask any 19-year-old college student), but for such a fraud to be widespread and organized, as the Republicans seem to suggest, there would have to be legions of people with valid fake IDs in the same identities that were registered. Since the fake names were blatantly made up by independent workers, this is not going to happen. A conspiracy in this manner would just not be practical.

In other words, in order for Batman being registered to really be a problem, Batman would have to actually show up and try to vote. One incident that happened in Illinois has gotten a lot of play in the media, where registration info was mailed to a dead pet goldfish. Illinois Republicans immediately claimed fraud. Not only would the fish have to actually appear and vote for this to be an issue, it wasn't registered in the first place... it was only sent information on how to register.

So really, Republican claims of fraud in this instance are just that... a fraud. They are an attempt to a) link Barack Obama to something that sounds like corruption, in the absence of actual corruption to link him to, and b) lay the groundwork for a possible challenge to the electoral results if necessary. Now, at the moment Obama seems to have a big lead in the polls, but if that tightens by election day, and I have little doubt that it will, we may see a long, drawn-out fight that Republicans have been preparing for some time now.