ACORN, McCain, Obama: Cracking The Politics Code

To hear some McCain advisers tell it, voter integrity wasn't supposed to be an election issue this year. As Sen. McCain and his team considered the expanse of the general election this spring, his chief counsel, Trevor Potter, sought to tone down Republican efforts to raise a ruckus about "voter fraud," arguing internally that GOP tactics in 2004 and 2006 had backfired. Instead, Potter would oversee a board comprised of trusted names -- Republicans like Warren Rudman and Jack Danforth -- and they'd try to work with Democrats to prevent problems on election day. Potter had a few concerns: he didn't want polling locations held open arbitrarily; he wanted Democrats and Republicans to work together to identify problem precincts.

GOP activists and state parties had other ideas. Many had invested political capital in the fact of voter fraud; others were simply acting from habit.  Republicans in Montana tried to purge thousands of voters from the file by matching registration changes against a national "change of address" list.  Not only is doing so patently illegal, a judge called the GOP effort "transparent:" As in -- transparently political.

McCain's lawyers asked the state party to stop, someone familiar with the situation said. The state party ignored the McCain campaign.

In Wisconsin, the attorney general, a Republican, sued to force the state's accountability board to review more than a million registrations collected since the passage of the national Help America Vote Act.  The McCain campaign was on board, agreeing that the state's chief law enforcement officer has the right to force the state to follow federal law, which would seem to require some sort of affirmative state action to verify the identity of the new registrant.  Democrats charged that the AG wanted to purge these voters from the list; the AG said he simply wanted to state to follow the law. ACORN is a different animal. For a while the McCain campaign resisted efforts to conflate ACORN's voter registration problems with voter fraud -- indeed, there's no correspondence between the two because Mickey Mouse can't vote.  When House Republicans described for McCain ACORN's (alleged) connection to the housing crisis, it was easier for the McCain campaign to incorporate ACORN in its talking points, which campaign manager Rick Davis promptly did, bragging that McCain's intervention made sure that ACORN wouldn't benefit from the bailout package that eventually passed.

Obama's chief counsel, Bob Bauer, was always skeptical, and he routinely chided a reporter who wondered whether Potter's intentions might be sound. As he said on a conference call with reporters today, "We need them to stop the suppressive activity. And then voters can vote and I'm sure everything will proceed smoothly." The view inside the Obama campaign is that the ACORN outrage seems unbelievably disingenuous on the part of Republicans who know better.  Anyone who has any familiarity with how these voter registration organizations work knows that (a) voter fraud and voter registration fraud are wildly different, (b) ACORN is required by law to submit the forms exactly as they are filled out, (c) the scale of voter registration this year is so immense that OF COURSE tens of thousands of bogus registrations will be filled out, (d) Mickey Mouse is not going to show up and vote, and (e), taking into consideration (a)-(d) above, along with the highly publicized voter registration drive being coordinated by the Obama campaign, it looks very much like the Republicans are trying to pre-emptively delegitimize Obama's victory.