ACORN vs. The Government

During the recent debates i heard a quick mention of something called ACORN(Fights Back Against Voter Suppression ) i got mixed up and lost in the gist of the the debate but today i understood the issue at hand. Obama did in deed donate money to the organization however had no tie to the scandal. Acorn claims "there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift." I think this is a very good perspective to come from given to the fact that according to the newyork times "they say the ones with phony names constitute no more than 1 percent of the total turned" this is a very small percentage and of that percentage the false ones had already been flagged for the government to check on "According to Acorn, most of the forms that are now causing controversy are ones that it flagged and that unsympathetic election officials then publicized." Which we witnessed at the debates. In actuality making people sign up 25 people a day was the only mistake ACORN made because they were forced to keep asking people who may have already been signed up or made up people themselves as i read in the Christopher Barkley story. So to sum this up 1% of voters through acorn were fraud, of that 1% the majority of them were flagged, so at that point it was out of ACORNs control of weather people voted twice or not so this really is no scandal. So knowing this we have nothing to worry about because ACORN isn't fraud...or do we? On ACORNS home website they mention what needs to be considered:

"The goals of the people orchestrating these attacks are to distract ACORN from helping people vote and to justify massive voter suppression. That’s the real voter fraud; the noise about a small fraction of the forms ACORN has turned in is meant to get the press and public take their eyes off the real threat, while those hurling the charges are stealing people’s right to vote in broad daylight."

Is this really the bigger concern? according to all of the facts, it definitely is. In Georgia a College student by the name of Kyla Berry got a last minute letter in the mail stating that she couldn't vote because she wasn't an United States Citizen. She knew this was odd because she had been born in Boston. It was too late for her to try to solve this mystery. Apparently in Georgia 2 million people are now having there social security checked to vote. why so late in the year and close to voting? they cant do this. the new york times mentioned "Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote." I think that this is a much bigger problem and is happening throughout a lot of these states and random people are being flagged for no reason and causing them not to vote. Where as Acorn flagged the people who actually were questionable and if the government overlooked that oh well, at least they weren't doing as they were in other states purposely stopping innocent voters.