GOP lawmaker compares ACORN to the KKK David Edwards and Nick Juliano

Published: Friday October 10, 2008





Print This Email This The organized assault from the Republican party on an organization dedicated to registering low-income and minority voters continued in full force Friday, with a prominent Republican lawmaker comparing the community organizers at Acorn with the Ku Klux Klan.



The Association of Community Organziations for Reform Now has faced repeated accusations of attempted voter fraud and investigations by state and federal officials of its activities in several key states. Feeney, a three term Florida Republican facing a difficult reelection races, launched wildly unsubstantiated accusations that Acorn has caused dead people to cast votes and somehow allowed the same voter to cast "20 to 30" ballots in a single election.



"This is destructive to democracy," he told Fox News Friday. "I believe Acorn has violated more Americans' civil rights to have their vote counted than any group since the KKK. It's an outrage."



The "fair & balanced" network, which has spent an inordinate amount of time over the last week parroting GOP talking points bashing Acorn and tying the group to Democratic candidate Barack Obama, didn't have an Acorn representative or anyone else to balance Feeney's tirade. Nor did they mention allegations against Feeney himself that he tried to subvert democracy by hacking electronic voting machines.



The Republicans seem far more willing to attack Acorn and trump up allegations of voter registration fraud than Democrats were to call for inquiries into electronic voting or other alleged irregularities four years ago.



President Bush's Justice Department has made a priority of investigating alleged voter fraud, although it's inquiries tend to lead nowhere. The American Prospect's Adam Serwer lays out the flaws in the GOP's claims, as were reported Thursday night on CNN. CNN is unable or unwilling to make the critical distinction between registration fraud and voter fraud. As I've said before, the former is really easy to do, even by accident, and the latter is extremely difficult and rarely occurs. The sheer volume of ACORN registration forms found in Indiana suggests the forms were deliberately filled out wrong, but they do not in any sense prove that there is a widespread liberal conspiracy to steal the election. More likely, ACORN workers were stealing time and trying to get paid without actually doing their jobs. Given how easily the forms were discovered, it would have to be the most inept scheme in the history of the United States. In contrast to Republicans' repeated crying about election fraud, comparatively little attention is being paid to thousands of voters being purged from registration rolls across the country. One assumes folks like Feeney would like to keep it that way.



This video is from Fox's Happening Now, broadcast October 10, 2008.









Download video via RawReplay.com







