Over the past several days, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has started an aggressive campaign against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). "ACORN is the nation's largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people." Recently, together with Project Vote Smart, they registered more than 1.3 million voters in 21 states.
Low- and moderate-income people have a tendency to vote Democratic and the RNC appears very concerned about how these new voters will affect the elections in November.
Last Thursday, the RNC had a conference call on ACORN in Wisconsin. Huffington Post reports that RNC discussed 'allegations that a voter registration group, ACORN, had hired seven workers with felony criminal records to gather voter registrations' and warned 'that doing so poses a risk to voters who provide registrars with personal information.'
Today, I received an email that the RNC was holding another conference call today about ACORN in Indiana. However, I didn't expect to see the RNC trying to suppress voter registration in Connecticut.
Yet this evening, I stumbled across a report at Only in Bridgeport which says that last Friday, Republican Registrar of Voters Joe Borges filed a complaint against ACORN with the 'State Elections Enforcement Commission'.
According to Borges,
The organization ACORN during the summer of 2008 conducted a registration drive, which has produced over a hundred rejections due to incomplete forms and individuals who are not citizens...also we have a box of duplicate cards and three boxes of forms returned by the P.O. as undeliverable. All of this has been a strain on my office and jeopardizes our ability to enter legitimate registration cards.
Any registration drive is going to generate incomplete forms and forms of people who are not eligible to vote. It is the job of the Registrar of Voters to review the forms and determine who is in fact eligible or not. If determining whether or not forms are filled in properly and whether or not the people registering to vote are in fact eligible is too much of a strain on Mr. Borges, then he should resign and be replaced with someone capable of doing the job.
Emeline Bravo Blackwood, Chair of the East End ACORN chapter in Bridgeport, issued the following statement:
I am proud to be a part of ACORN's work to help more than 20,000 individuals fill out voter registration applications in Connecticut so far this year. Nationally, we have helped more than 1.3 million people fill out voter registration cards as part of our campaign to increase civic participation among low- and moderate income voters. It is shameful that partisan, right wing operatives - who are clearly afraid of our ability to bring low income people to the polls on election day - are more interested in slinging trumped up allegations at ACORN than in working with us in our campaigns to stop foreclosures and predatory lending, win paid sick days, raise the minimum wage, and make sure that low- income, working families have a seat at the table in our Democracy.
Here in Connecticut, there is still time to register new voters. Please, do everything you can to make sure as many eligible voters are registered and make it to the polls this November so that we can work together with great groups like ACORN to address the economic woes are country faces for the benefit of all people.
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