McCain calls for 'voter fraud' inquiry
Community organizing group ACORN is accused of padding election rolls with false registration cards, but it's unlikely they would lead to fraudulent votes.
WASHINGTON — Over the last year and a half, paid employees of ACORN, a liberal-leaning community organizing group, have helped 1.3 million mostly young, mostly poor people register to vote, enrolling more new voters overall than any nonpartisan group in the country.
Why some applications reportedly were signed by Mickey Mouse and supposed members of the Dallas Cowboys, among others, emerged as the latest campaign controversy Tuesday when John McCain and Barack Obama traded charges on whether the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now has tried to pad election rolls with thousands of suspect voters.
The fracas escalated as the candidates crammed for the third and final presidential debate tonight. McCain, the Republican nominee, has lost ground steadily in recent weeks, and the final face-off may provide his last chance to reverse the slide.
McCain aides first accused ACORN of misdeeds last week. McCain upped the ante Tuesday when he called for an immediate investigation of what he described as "voter fraud going on" in battleground states. He also sought to tie the alleged irregularities directly to his Democratic opponent.
McCain told a TV station in Orlando, Fla., that Sen. Obama "has had relations with ACORN in the past," and he compared those ties to Obama's prior associations with William Ayers, a Vietnam-era radical who now is a professor of education in Chicago.
But election-law experts say there is a big difference between submitting bad registration cards and casting a "fraudulent vote." Thanks to new rules for checking newly registered voters, it is unlikely that bad names will be added to the rolls or lead to fraudulent ballots, they say.
"Mickey Mouse may show up on a registration list, but he's not likely to vote," said Ohio State law professor Daniel P. Tokaji.
Obama, responding to McCain, said he represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois in the mid-1990s to force the state to implement a federal law allowing people to register to vote when they obtain a driver's license. The U.S. Justice Department was on the same side as ACORN.
"That was my relationship and that is my relationship to ACORN," Obama told reporters at a resort near Toledo, Ohio, where he is preparing for the debate.
ACORN, Obama added, is not advising him and does not work for his campaign, which has run its own voter registration drive.
