– Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL): “One organization in particular has developed a reputation for lawlessness in the electoral process.”

– Ken Blackwell (R-OH): “Election Day this year may bring the kind of chaos you expect from a category-five hurricane – with radical groups sending the nation into a protracted legal battle even worse than the mess back in 2000.”

– Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): “[B]ecause the violations of federal voting laws by ACORN employees appear to be so widespread, ACORN and its affiliates should be investigated as a criminal enterprise.”

As Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College who investigated allegations of widespread voter fraud but found no evidence to support such claims, told Salon:

The fact is that ACORN has been smeared by [conservatives]. Some of their employees do seem to fake registrations, sure, but when Macy’s has some of their employees stealing from them, we would not call them a quasi-criminal organization — we still call them a department store. ACORN is trying to help underprivileged people vote.

The small number of staffers who have knowingly submitted fraudulent registration forms are violating ACORN’s mission. When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. The same principle applies here.

Unfortunately, widespread voter suppression — unlike the myths of voter fraud and registration fraud — does exist. McCain has not raised any alarm about this troubling reality.

There’s simply no way to gather over one million new voter registration forms without some of the forms having been filled out with bogus information. You could ask the group to automatically toss out the obviously wrong ones — some guy saying he’s Tony Romo, someone else saying he’s Mickey Mouse — but the law requires them to hand all the forms in to prevent them from tossing out forms filled out by people who say they want to register Republican. Consequently, if you go out and register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people and also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.

Meanwhile, if you want to reduce the number of bad forms submitted, you have basically three options:

1. Make voter registration much easier and more automatic so as to reduce the need for registration drives.
2. Let registration organizers toss out forms.
3. Stop all registration drives by conflating good faith errors with systematic, criminal fraud.

Conservatives like option (3) because they don’t like it when large numbers of people vote. And that’s what this is about, finding a backdoor way to delegitimize all efforts at large-scale registration drives. It’d be as if instead of trying to ban computers (obviously impossible) you passed a law saying you could throw someone in jail for selling a computer that’s prone to crashing. It’s computer sales fraud — the thing’s supposed to work! Well, nobody knows how to build a crash-free computer so, bye bye computer industry.