Acorns, Buckeyes & Chestnuts
          Racism may be the elephant in the voting booth Nov. 4, but there is an even bigger elephant already in the room this election season that Americans have overlooked. It is just beginning to get some attention.
          Groups with strong Republican ties, including GOP groups them- selves, have been waging a war of sorts around the country that goes beyond the current effort to create a scandal involving the Acorn voter-registration group and to tie it to the Democrats through Barack Obama.
          The effort to smear Obama with Acorn is just a small part of a much larger picture. The apparent true purpose of creating an Acorn scandal is to give credibility, legal and otherwise, to Republican backers who want to negate the newly registered voters Democrats are counting on Nov. 4.
          That effort meshes with several other GOP-led tactics already underway, including a purging even of voters who may have been regis- tered for years, but who may not live in a Zip Code attached to a lily- white suburb. The Zip Code tactic is called “caging” in the  world of direct-marketing. And that will bring us around to an old name in GOP politics, Richard Viguerie, who is alive and well and living in Virginia— and still operating.
          Operating through the McCain/Palin campaign and the right-wing network of e-mails and other spam, the strategy appears to be to keep your mind on Acorn while the GOP deals itself a card from the bottom of the deck.
          As one of the McCain/Palin campaign’s tactics of “guilt by association,” it is beating the drums saying Obama has ties to Acorn, which the campaign also says is engaged in fraud as the group sends out volunteers around the country to sign up new voters.
          The example cited most often as evidence of fraud is that in some places voter registration cards have been turned in to county clerks bearing the name “Mickey Mouse,” and in Nevada, the Dallas Cowboys football team’s starting lineup. The GOP, with the McCain/Palin cam- paign providing its voice, extrapolates those anecdotes to say there is nationwide fraud going on.
          The big lie is being delivered like a drumbeat by John McCain, who says Acorn “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.” Not true. It seems it is the GOP operatives who are setting things up to “destroy the fabric of democracy” come election day.
          Get this straight. McCain/Palin are telling you all these people who registered falsely, whether as “Mickey Mouse” or common names, are going to show up on election day and present false IDs, supposedly even a driver’s license for “Mickey Mouse” with a likeness of the would- be voter, and be allowed to cast a vote. Get real. And how about all those duplicate registrations claimed. One person is going to be allowed to vote over and over? Get real.
          The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now was begun in the 1960s by community organizations populated by “com- munity organizers,” of which, of course, Obama was one.
          The purpose of those organizers was to help people with low to moderate incomes survive and work in a democracy that more often than not is stacked against them. To that end, Acorn began helping people in those income classes to register to vote so they would have a greater say in that system stacked against them.
          Unfortunately, Acorn, spurred the past two years by a community organizer with a shot at the presidency, stepped up its voter-registration drive. Part of that nationwide effort involved paying volunteers $2 per reg- istration as an incentive to work hard. It was a bit naïve to think many of the volunteers would not be dishonest when the chance to earn more money was involved. It should come as no surprise people at the low end of the scale would be just as greedy as those at the top, just not as successful at it.
          In fact, what is being done may not even be a crime in many juris-dictions. The crime would be if the would-be voter registered as Mickey Mouse showed up with ID made out to Mickey Mouse and bearer actual- ly attempted to use it to vote. That would be the fraud John McCain claims already is going on. But if any laws are being violated they should be prosecuted along with those behind the effort.
          But, as noted, making that situation a campaign issue is only the tip of the iceberg of what is going on here. The real fraud is being perpe-trated by Republican groups behind the scenes.
          Well before the Acorn “scandal,” in the wake of the 2000 presi-dential vote that ended up with the conservative-dominated U.S. Su- preme Court appointing George W. Bush as president, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a law in 2002 to require and fund state efforts to improve voting procedures. The Help America Vote Act in- cluded a provision requiring states to create a statewide database so their voters could check to see if they are registered properly.
          Traditionally, any effort to get more citizens registered to vote tends to sweep up far more people in the low- to middle-income groups than the wealthy. That would be no surprise to the Republican Party. So it is no surprise the GOP Congress included another provision in the law.
          HAVA required each state, once its database was in place, to check the registrations against other state records, such as Social Se- curity number or drivers licenses and strike from the registration lists names that do not match those records. The law then requires the state to notify those whose names were struck and allow them to prove their registration was correct (they could have been flagged because they used a nickname that did not match the driver’s license, for example).
          As those state databases have come on line, Republican groups in many states have been using the databases to launch their own chal- lenges of registered voters. The methods vary, but many GOP operatives are sending voters on the databases a registered letter, or a letter with all the appearance of junk mail, or any other method designed to obscure the fact there is a letter inside notifying the voter his registration was being questioned and advising that he needed to respond.
          If the voter failed to respond, the GOP would use that as evidence the registration was fraudulent and lodge a formal challenge of the regis- tration. Most of the voters would not know until they attempt to vote that there is a problem. They are required to be given a “provisional ballot” in such cases, but whether those actually are counted usually is prob- lematic.
          Republicans appear poised to use the law to create havoc at election time by increasing the number of voters around the country who would be issued provisional ballots on election day, jamming up what is expected to be a record turnout for a presidential election, with their challenged registrations considered one by one before their vote could be counted, and only after the election is over.
          To that end, the Ohio Republican Party sued state officials and got an appeals court ruling that would have required those officials to do the impossible and to have the state provide each county with its share of the third of the 666,000 voters registered this year whose registrations did not match, so the county officials could prevent them from voting.
          Because 200,000 registrations could not be checked out by election day to determine which actually were fraudulent, their provisional ballots would not be counted on election day, possible throwing the result in a key state in doubt. Armed with Democratic Party objections to that appellate court’s order, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the order with no comment.
          But the ever-resourceful GOP is not finished. It has other arrows in its quiver.
          Back in the 1960s an ultra-conservative man in the Virginia sub- urbs of Washington, D.C., built a reputation as a direct-marketing whiz. That’s direct-marketing, as in the form of junk mail and now nearly ban- ned junk telephone calls.
          Now operating as American Target Advertising, Richard Viguerie invented direct mail targeted at ideological and political themes. Others later caught onto the techniques and that is why thousands of people in wealthier areas of the country receive free glossy magazines crammed with high-end advertising about lifestyles of the wealthy. Middle- and low- income never see them unless they work as maids, nannies or make housecalls as “Joe the plumber.”
          That special targeting is simple. The marketers of which Viguerie is the master simply select the Zip Codes of the wealthier neighbor- hoods and send magazines, conservative come-ons and other junk targeted at their interests.
          The technique also works at the other end of the income scale. Republican operatives are using the same technique to check voter registration lists and extract those that list addresses in the poorer Zip Code areas. They then send that disguised letter to the registered ad- dress advising the residents they needed to verify their voter registration.
         And those are techniques we know of. Who knows what else GOP groups have up their sleeves this election season to discredit and even deny the votes of those who would vote for Obama and other Dem- ocrats.