The answer to the title question is this: The big banks and other big-moneyed interests intend to tar ACORN with some of the very same election-related crimes that they themselves have been practicing ...and the Main Stream Media (owned by big-moneyed interests) have turned a blind eye to.
With regard to the recent (likely big-money sponsored) sting operation, which entangled only a very few of ACORN’s 700 employees, watch this DemocracyNow! segment:
Now let’s return to the “voter fraud” issue. The big-moneyed interests fear that if all of the “low- to moderate-income people across the United States” were to vote, candidates less deferential to the big-moneyed interests might be elected.
So, last fall ACORN was accused of registering voters who gave their names as “Mickey Mouse” or were registered in one state and falsely pretended to be an eligible voter in another.
But to the extent this may have been true, (1) such false registrations were clearly the faults of those who filled out the forms, (2) those folks who falsely filled out forms would be extremely unlikely to risk committing a felony double vote under the name Mickey Mouse and/or by traveling to another state to take this risk, (3) any conceivable culpability on the part of ACORN in such situations would not have been a felony, and...
(4) ACORN has never in fact been charged with “voter fraud.”
The same can’t be said of operatives sponsored by the big-moneyed interests.
Here’s what the MSM hasn’t told you: In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul and Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states. The group was run by Nathan Sproul, the former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party. And thanks to the sleuthing of John R. Brakey, Mark Crispin Miller, and Jared Irmas, it is known that Sproul’s voter registration services, “political consulting,” and certain unspecified post-election activities were paid for by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to the tune of $8,359,161(!) – making Sproul the eighth largest expenditure of the RNC’s 2004 campaign. (You can download a copy of this story here.)
Do you think the RNC lavished all this money on Sproul for honest election-related activities?
Well, in fact, back in the fall of 2004 Sproul’s firm was up to its corporate keister in dirty tricks THAT WERE FELONIES. Below I’ve extracted one paragraph from a much longer article entitled “Republican Dirty Tricks” by Max Blumenthal, posted on AlterNet October 15, 2004:
Sproul's dirty tricks may have finally caught up with him, though far from his stomping grounds in Arizona. In Oregon, Sproul's firm is being investigated by the state attorney general and could face a class-C felony, punishable by five years in jail, for allegedly altering and destroying voter registration forms. And in Nevada, state election officials have just launched an investigation into whether Sproul's Voters Outreach of America destroyed the registration forms of exclusively Democratic voters.
Did the MSM tell you about this? Well, they have been pretty mum on this subject, but CNN did put out this story. Still, there have been no news reports of any of Sproul’s people being convicted of felony destruction voter registration forms. But Sproul and Associates received as much as $2.3 million of their total $8.3 million in payments from the RNC after the 2004 Election. Could it be that much of this late-arriving money was a legal defense fund?
So let’s summarize.
Nathan Sproul and the groups he controlled were paid $8.3 million to commit (and perchance defend themselves against charges of) felony election fraud in 2004 ...and yet he appears to have gotten away scot-free.
ACORN, a group representing “low- to moderate-income people” (and thus unlikely to have a multi-million dollar defense fund) is falsely accused of doing what Sproul did ...and is now denounced by both houses of Congress for the indiscretions of likely no more than a dozen of its 700 low-paid employees caught in a sting operation (run by Sproul?).
Post Script:
US voter registration group under attack
By Tom Eley
21 September 2009
