Get a grip on elections

Escalating rage over the role of ACORN in registering presumably Democratic voters threatens to undermine the political legitimacy of a Barack Obama victory Nov. 4. And perhaps that's the point. But if John McCain were well ahead in the polls, the left would undoubtedly be shouting about electoral-system failures to de-legitimize a GOP win. It is too late to tone down the rhetoric for 2008, but if we want to end these sorts of attacks, there's only one solution: States must become more serious about how they administer elections.

The ACORN controversy -- in which hundreds of thousands of registration cards gathered by the Assn. of Community Organizers for Reform Now, including some that were fraudulent, were rejected by election officials -- represents nothing new. Republicans have been charging that Democrats inflate voter rolls for decades; likewise, Democrats accuse Republicans of suppressing legitimate votes.

But this year that hoary chestnut has collided with laws intended to make voting easier, particularly the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, or the "motor voter" law, and the 2002 Help America Vote Act, or HAVA. The first requires states to allow registration at a wide variety of government agencies and by mail. The second requires states to maintain centralized, computerized voter registration lists and to compare names against those in other government databases, such as driver's licenses.

ACORN and similar groups have undertaken massive voter registration drives because many states have been reluctant to follow through on their motor-voter obligation. In some cases, this is simply because social service agencies and motor vehicle offices are struggling to perform their core functions, much less provide voter registration services. But some state governments simply have decided not to comply. Either way, millions of eligible voters still find it hard to register.

HAVA also revealed the poor condition of many states' core databases: Comparisons between the voter rolls and driver's licenses have yielded hundreds of thousands of mismatches -- almost all of which are because of clerical problems such as typos, not fraudulent registrations.

In this context, the ACORN scandal might seem to be the final push toward turning 2008 into the perfect storm of election chaos. Despite its aggressive quality control, ACORN's business of paying people for each new registration has become a meaty treat for right-wing carnivores. When McCain warns that ACORN is "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy," he is setting the stage for his followers to refuse to accept the result of the election.