Two kinds of fraud

"Acorn" may not exactly be a household word, but it was on the cover of one of the newspapers I read in hard copy today, so it seemed worth getting into a marginal story that the GOP is trying to make central.

The key distinction here is between voter fraud and voter registration fraud, one of which is truly dangerous, the other a petty crime.

The former would be, say, voting the cemeteries or stuffing the ballot boxes. This has happened occasionally in American history, though I can think of recent instances only in rare local races. Practically speaking, this can most easily be done by whoever is actually administering the election, which is why partisan observers carefully oversee the vote-counting process.

The latter is putting the names of fake voters on the rolls, something that happens primarily when organizations, like Acorn, pay contractors for new voter registrations. That can be a crime, and it messes up the voter files, but there's virtually no evidence these imaginary people then vote in November. The current stories about Acorn don't even allege a plan to affect the November vote.

So the New York Post's story leads:

Two Ohio voters, including Domino's pizza worker Christopher Barkley, claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they'd already signed up.

There's not even an allegation that the guy was being pressed to vote twice.

Acorn, meanwhile, is denouncing the raid on its Nevada office as a political stunt and says it had tried to alert authorities to its own bad registrations.

And Acorn is taking credit for registering 1.3 million new voters, which is a lot, though the fake ones, of course, along with being against the law, are worthless.