ACORN flap distracts from real election shenanigans

As near as I can tell, only a small percentage of the voter registrations turned in by ACORN were fraudulent. Most of those were already flagged as suspect by ACORN, which is required by law to turn in all signatures collected, so I hardly see how this is a great burden upon elections officials or a threat to "the fabric of democracy" as Republicans like to put it.

No, what really scares the Republicans is that ACORN has signed up millions of legitimate new voters who are unlikely to vote for them. Given that ACORN disproportionately represents poor black people, this seems like a last-ditch appeal to latent racism.Worse still, these attacks are a distraction from Republicans' own attempts to suppress the vote. Indiscriminate purging of voter rolls and a systematic failure to properly staff and equip Democratic-leaning polling places have stolen the vote from millions in the last two elections, and the damage done by overtly partisan voting machine vendors simply cannot be measured.

These problems will be even worse this year, and the Republicans are simply trying to make enough noise to drown out this important news.