ACORN v. Voter suppression

The acorn scandal, what is it? Why is it a big deal? the acorn scandal was first brought up by presidential candidate John McCain in the third debate. ACORN is “a nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people”[1]what they do is, they have people that go out and get people to register to vote, then the forms are sent to the government offices where they are put into the databases.
The problem that has arisen because the people who go out and get the registration forms have a certain amount that they have to get every day, otherwise they don’t get paid. Some of these people were not able to get citizens to register, so they stared to make fake forms with names such as “Mickey Mouse” and other bogus names. John McCain stated that the ACORN incident “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy”[2].

Maybe we should focus on some bigger issues such as voter suppression:

Voter suppression has been around for a long time, the methods have changed, but it is still around. One of the largest ones was a law passed called the “help Americans vote[3]” act. Under this act, the registrating voters write down their social security number or their driver’s license number, and if anything on the card is not exactly the same such as a name or a number, then it will automatically get denied.

College students also get suppressed, In Colorado, students are being told from the Republican county clerk that students cannot register to vote if their parents claimed them as a dependant on their tax returns[4]. In some places, students have been incorrectly told that they could lose federal financial aid, if they registered to vote at their college address[5]. These are only some of the pressures and obsticles that people face.

I think that with things like voter suppression happening, the acorn scandal is not a very big deal. The only way people would be able to use the acorn thing to their benefit is if with allot of work people were able to basically make another identity for themselves, this is not easy. The big issue that we should be worrying about is “voter suppression”, which is illegal. And it goes against the natural rights that all people have.




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[1] http://acorn.org/index.php?id=12342
[2] http://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/debate/debate_transcript.pdf
[3] http://www.fec.gov/hava/law_ext.txt
[4] http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977491424
[5] http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/10/09/1009collegevoting.html