The Trib, ACORN and Reality

Yawn.  The Trib's up in arms about ACORN.  Again.  And they're spinning reality so madly that one fears for their sanity.  Again.

Specifically I want you to look at the end of the second paragraph:

Corrupt ACORN affiliate Project Vote -- former employer of President Obama -- is pulling Justice Department and White House strings to register more voters on public assistance, documents newly obtained by Judicial Watch show.

It's happening despite voter-registration fraud convictions of at least 70 ACORN/Project Vote employees in 12 states since 2006. And even though more than a third of the 1.3 million registrations ACORN/Project Vote submitted during the 2008 election cycle proved invalid, according to a 2009 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report.

Are you sitting down? The spin involved in that last sentence will simply amaze.
Remember, the paragraph is about registration fraud.  The implication is that all those registrations ("more than a third of the 1.3 million") are fraudulent.  And that ACORN committed the fraud.

Note, however, that the whole thing begins to unravel when you see that the braintrust does not use the word "fraudulent" when describing those registrations but "invalid".  Gotta wonder why the shift, right?

The first thing we have to do is to track down that House Committee report.

Here it is.  And here's what the report had to say about all those registrations:

One-third of the 1.3 million voter registration cards turned in by ACORN in 2008 were invalid.3

That "3" in there is a foot note. And where does that foot note lead?

  Here. It's a column from the Wall Street Journal by John Fund - from 2008.  And he wrote:

The FBI is investigating its voter registration efforts in several states, amid allegations that almost a third of the 1.3 million cards it turned in are invalid.

It's a start, but it really doesn't get us anywhere, does it?.  Eventually, if you dig around enough, you'll find this piece at the New York Times - also from 2008:

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.

So those rejected registrations were certainly invalid - but not all of them were fraudulent.  You see the difference, right?  And you see why the braintrust had to shift adjectives on you, right?

Also from 2008, an ACORN spokesperson had a few things to say about this:

“In most states, ACORN is required by law to turn in every voter registration card — even in cases where the cards are not valid,” the organization insists, adding that ACORN “has reported almost all of the issues regarding voter registration cards.”

And then as an after thought, we should add:

Invalid voter registration cards do NOT constitute voter fraud. Even RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has recently acknowledged he is not aware of a single improper vote cast as a result of bad cards submitted in the course of an organized voter registration effort.

So ACORN is the one who flagged the invalid registrations as fraudulent and ACORN turned them in because they were required to do so.

And yet, when you go back to the braintrust's description, you get an entirely different picture, don't you?

The whole editorial is about an improper collusion between the DOJ and Project Vote.  Regarding that, do I need to point out how much money Richard Mellon Scaife's given to Judicial Watch, the initial source of this editorial?

$8.74 million, according to MediaMatters - more than all the other foundations listed combined.

Interesting, don't you think?