During the McCain and Obama Presidential contest, ACORN was first accused by Republicans of voter fraud and then the FBI was said to be investigating the organization and raided its offices.

What is ACORN?

In order to understand this case its important to understand what ACORN is and what they do. They have a host of low and moderate income issues they support. However, with regards to elections, they perform voter registration for groups that are typically disenfranchised from the political system. That is they pay people to register other people who ordinarily would not be part of the electoral system.

According to Wikipedia:

“Where ACORN has discovered that its workers submitted potentially false voter registration forms, it has followed legal requirements to submit the forms to voter registrars, flagged as requiring additional attention. San Diego County, California officials stated that ACORN-submitted registrations had a rejection rate of 17 percent for all errors in 2008, whether innocent or intentional, compared to less than five percent for voter drives by other organizations.^[19]” – Wikipedia

This is what the controversy was about. That a higher percentage of their registrations were rejected, that is they were not valid. Some of these rejections were due to fictitious names. For instance, Mickey Mouse was registered to vote in some county. First its important to understand that this is not voter fraud, this is registration fraud. However, registration fraud is a very bad way to try and influence an election. The registration is cross checked with other pieces of personal data and is rather easily eliminated from the voter role. Secondly, registering people that do not exist might be good for a person being paid to collect registrations, but it does not do anything to affect the election, because that fictitious person never appears to vote, even if the registration cross check does not work properly. So, if ACORN were fraudulently attempting to influence the election, registering people that do not exist is a strange way to do it.

The FBI Comes In

Now we come to the FBI’s involvement. As you should be able to tell from the paragraph above, there was no voter fraud charged against ACORN, only registration fraud, which ACORN would never have benefited from, and which was mostly likely done by people who worked for ACORN that were attempting to get their “numbers” up. These faulty registrations were already eliminated by a computerized matching system. So the question arises, why did the FBI decide to peruse this case? There are elections boards that could investigate (although there would be little reason to bother). So why the interest from the FBI, which does not specialize in voter fraud investigations? The answer most likely lies in political patronage. Having the FBI investigate ACORN might have helped McCain in his bid for the presidency. Bush, who holds the reigns of the Department of Justice, which holds the reigns of the FBI wants McCain to win to obvious reasons. (and less obvious, as an Obama presidency is more likely to uncover the massive amount of illegal activtiy which took place under Bush).

The FBI’s Great Concern for Voting Integrity

What is most interesting is that there were documented irregularities in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida and in the 2004 election in Ohio, yet the FBI did not see fit to investigate. Tens of thousands of voters were removed from the roles by ChoicePoint (http://www.choicepoint.com/), voting machines gave Gore negative votes, the list goes on and on, yet the FBI never did any investigating. As the movie Hacking Democracy (http://www.hackingdemocracy.com/) shows, DieBold (http://www.diebold.com/default.htm) is continuing to make and sell a voting machine that can be hacked in 10 seconds, which has a program on memory cards and which uses a database with no logging system (MS Access) as the system of record for the voting database. Yet, the FBI does not investigate. Perhaps on the Diebold voting machine issue, the head of DieBold’s promise to deliver Florida for Bush in 2004 may have had something to do with the FBI’s lack of interest. These are “real” instances of voter fraud and voter suppression, not some easily correctable and non-issue like the ACORN affair. This brings up the question of how the FBI chooses its cases. As the Elliot Spitzer investigation and the ACORN investigation point towards, the FBI is about investigating things that give the current administration a leg up on the competition. Illegality is an almost incidental concern at the FBI, political patronage and scratching the back of concentrated power their first priority. Hollywood might want to consider this when the make their next FBI movie that shows the Bureau doing things that help protect the general public.