It always amuses me when someone labels an organization "a radical leftist" group. You'd think that every organization to ever challenge the Republican party are filled with nothing but communists and assorted class warfare specialists. In the case of ACORN, this label is especially misplaced.

ACORN, much like organizations like the NRA and the ACLU, are interests groups whose advocacy ties them specifically to one party. In this case, the advocacy of ACORN is to register poor voters, especially minority ones - a group that slants strongly towards the Democrats. They are an issue group, not a group that is aimed at the advancement of one political ideology or another. This is why Republicans like John McCain can attend an ACORN rally - ACORN is not a part of the liberal agenda, it's an advocacy group.

But beyond that, it is insane that ACORN is the organziation that is demonized. ACORN works in flawed ways - not only do they sign up poor voters, but they frequently employ the same out-of-work people in those poor communities to register people. This is meant to, of course, give more jobs to the community, but it also creates the unfortunate circumstances that we're currently facing - sometimes, people cut corners when they're desperate, and ACORN is just an unfortunate victim of happenstance.

Furthermore, when these people submit these faux registrations, they are costing ACORN money. Furthermore, registration fraud is not the same as voter fraud. When Democrats were screaming about voting machine malfunctions in 2004 and 2000, that was because those "errors" lead to votes not being counted and have a big impact on the final result of an election. Registration fraud, on the other hand, are very difficult to turn into voter fraud. I can register Adam "Pacman" Jones in Nevada as many times as I want, but unless as many Adam Jones as I registered show up to vote come November 4th, each with their own registration, this cannot be turned into extra votes for anyone. ACORN benefits in no way from false registration records. In fact, the majority of these are already confirmed to be false by ACORN, but because you must submit every registration form filled out per law, they had to be turned in anyways.

ACORN has been a punching bag for the Republican party for a long time now. Every four years the Republicans raise the same issues about ACORN, but despite this, there has been no extensive connections between ACORN and Voter Fraud. Registration fraud occurs, and it is unfortunate they do, but these are not the same as voter fraud. This is not some liberal conspiracy to get more votes, this is about the inefficiencies of acorn and the mistakes of a few, desperate people.