In 2006, ACORN submitted more than 70,000 voter registration applications collected from Missouri citizens in under-represented, mainly African-American neighborhoods; the organization is campaigning for a statewide ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage.  The disenfranchisement campaign began with a series of attacks in the media by Republican Board of Elections officials claiming that ACORN had submitted "potentially fraudulent cards." ACORN has not been allowed to see the evidence behind these attacks in St. Louis, despite promises and repeated requests.

Late last week, the political motives of the press attacks against ACORN became evident as a series of possible voting rights violations came to light in St. Louis:

*    The St. Louis Board of Elections sent a letter to thousands of citizens who had submitted voter registration applications through ACORN's registration drive, instructing the recipient to sign and return the letter and call the Board of Elections "no later than November 1 to insure that your application is complete and you are eligible to vote on November 7."

*    Scott Leinendecker, the Republican Director of the St. Louis City Board of Elections mentioned a legally-questionable requirement in an article that ran on Oct. 28 in the St. Louis Press-Dispatch: refusing to register voters who left a non-requited box on a form blank, rather than writing "none."  

*    At least one early voter reports being required to show a photo ID at the St. Louis Board, a policy that would violate a State Supreme Court injunction.

*    In a fairly bizarre twist, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch also reported this weekend that Leinendecker had provided a job to a woman who had been fired from the ACORN minimum wage canvass and went on to make untrue accusations of ACORN campaign misconduct on a local blog.

Background

The letter from the St. Louis City Board is part of a concerted scheme by people who seek suppress minority voter participation. In an early October meeting with Scott Leidendecker the Republican Director of the St. Louis Board of Elections, ACORN attorney Brian Mellor, following ACORN's practice of working cooperatively with election officials in the course of its registration drives, twice asked Leindendecker if the Board had any concerns about voter registration cards submitted by ACORN. (He pointed out a box of cards labeled "ACORN" on a nearby table.) Leidnedecker replied "no" and that the cards submitted by ACORN "were all fine." Mellor was surprised to receive a cell phone call, as he was leaving this very meeting, from a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, asking for comment on Leidendecker's allegation that he possessed "1,500 potentially fraudulent voter registration cards submitted by ACORN."

Since this incident, Republican Board of Election Directors in Kansas City and St. Louis County have also contacted the media to issue statements about "potentially questionable" voter registration cards submitted by ACORN. The accusations have received widespread media coverage, which has often obscured important facts about ACORN's voter registration work.

*    ACORN is required to turn in ALL signed voter registrations collected Missouri to the Board of Elections, even ones it suspects to be invalid.

*    ACORN flags cards it knows to be incomplete or potentially invalid at the point when they are turned in, for appropriate verification of follow-up by the Board of Elections.

*    In the course of ACORN's voter registration drives, the organization routinely meets with Board of Elections officials to review the quality of its work, and to establish a cooperative relationship.

*     In a handful of cases, ACORN has identified (and fired) employees who may have tried to defraud the organization by submitting duplicate or bogus cards. In such cases, ACORN seeks to have these individuals prosecuted.

*    ACORN encourages anyone to investigate these matters and cooperates with these investigations.

Other Attacks

The attempts to harass ACORN and distract the organization from its work to boost minority voter turnout have taken two other forms. The Missouri Republican Party announced that it was filing a FEC complaint against ACORN based on newspaper accounts of the testimony of a fired worker on a local blog.

On Oct. 26, Senator Charles Grassley, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee sent a letter to ACORN asking for extensive information (a list of all ACORN employees, a list of all ACORN funders, etc.) The letter and the accompanying press release referenced the press reports or attacks on ACORN's voter registration work in Missouri. There were two threshold misunderstandings in this letter: ACORN is not a 501c3, tax exempt organization, and ACORN does not receive government funding.

Historical Experience

ACORN has faced and defeated voter suppression campaigns that included attempts to smear its name before:

*    In Florida in 2004, as ACORN successfully led a campaign to raise the state's minimum wage, it dealt with widely-reported and wild accusations of voter registration misconduct, which the accusers later admitted, in federal court, were completely false and defamatory.

*    This year, ACORN organizers in Ohio took a sample of a batch of cards deemed "potentially fraudulent" because of "bad addresses" by a hostile election official. They obtained ten signed statements from eligible voters living at these addresses that they were in fact, there, and wanted to register to vote.

Implications

These latest attacks against ACORN are just the tip of the iceberg.  They are part of a much larger plan that begins with pretending America has a problem of ineligible people trying to vote.  As a recent report to the Elections Assistance Commission showed, that's just not the way even the most unscrupulous politicians try to thwart democracy these days.  Instead they do it by keeping people from voting -- voter suppression.  

And it starts with attacks on organizations that are out there doing the hard work of voter registration that in every other democracy is the government's job, they attack them because some of the voters assisted left a form incomplete or because they voters who weren't sure whether they were registered erred on the side of filling out a form, so the board of elections could check it to make sure they were on the rolls.  And they tell reporters that those forms too are "suspicious."

Why? All to keep people from voting.  In the short run, they want to make sure these tens of thousands of largely African-American voters don't vote in Missouri's tightly contested U.S. Senate election this year.

In the long run, they want to use the fictions they create about the existence of fraudulent voters  to justify the kinds of restrictions that forced the League of Women Voters to close down its voter registration operations in Florida this year, that sharply cut the number of voters who could be registered in Ohio this year,

The Voting Right Act was passed August 1965 after the brutal attack on voting rights marchers in Selma, Ala. captured attention of the nation. Today, 40 years after the Act was implemented and upheld Supreme Court, voter suppression continues to be a very real tactic in the arsenal of entrenched interests. The most glaring cases of keeping minorities off the rolls are occurring in Missouri.

Now, as then, the national community must lend its support for the community leaders who have braved derision and worse in order to exercise their right to participate in our democracy.