Kafka at the Polls

With only a week to go, Republicans have been busy trying to use computer errors to make voters disappear in swing states such as Georgia, Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin.

"What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," says Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

In Georgia, the regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit claiming, "people are being told they are non-citizens, including both naturalized citizens and U.S-born citizens. They're being told they're not eligible to vote, based on information in a database that hasn't been checked and approved by the Department of Justice, and that we know has flaws in it."

In Ohio, the state Republican Party sued to make the Democratic secretary of state generate a list of people who had mismatched information, but Jennifer Brunner refused on the grounds that it might disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters. The Supreme Court last week ruled in her favor.

While criticizing ACORN for inaccuracies in registering new voters, Republican elves have been very busy trying to block the existing who might vote the wrong way.

The ACORN Non-Issue

Amid all the Republican accusations against ACORN for its drive to register new voters, the simple truth seems to be that hourly workers scammed the non-profit organization by submitting fake names, but there is no evidence whatsoever of fraud by non-existent voters actually going to the polls to cast ballots.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is guilty of sloppiness but no sinister intent to rig the election for former community organizer Barack Obama.

When con artists fill their quotas of new names with the lineup of the Dallas Cowboys, as they did in Las Vegas, raiding the ACORN offices for evidence of voter fraud may seem excessive to everyone but Fox News.

"When we have identified suspicious applications," an ACORN official explains, "we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations.

"Today's raid by the secretary of state's office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls."

The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, according to CNN, "reviewed voter fraud claims across the country and found that most were caused by technical glitches, clerical errors or mistakes made by voters. One other finding: A person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate another voter at the polls."

But desperate Republicans have been hoping to be struck by lightning for some time now.