ACORN Gets Court to Reinstate Hundreds of thousands of Eligible Voters, Ignored by Ohio Sec. of State Blackwell.

It turns out the right wing attacks on ACORN for voter registration fraud was way off, having more to do with Republicans intentionally NOT registering potential voters, violating the National Voter Registration Act. The old switcheroo.

Bradblog: The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has won a substantive victory on behalf of the voters of Ohio --- perhaps hundreds of thousands of them --- via a court case filed in 2006, challenging a number of voter suppression tactics employed by the state's then Sec. of State, Ken Blackwell (R). The victory may lead to the registration of "hundreds of thousands of voting-eligible low-income Ohioans". ACORN alleged that Blackwell and officials from Ohio's Department of Job and Family Services (DJFS) had systematically violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA)."

The major issue here is breaking the National Voter Registration Act. Get this:

A 2005 survey conducted by ACORN revealed that only 3 out of 103 people exiting a DJFS office were offered a form asking whether they wanted to register to vote. Between 2002 and 2004, DJFS offices for rural counties with relatively small populations registered far more voters than urban counties with larger populations and more people living at or below the poverty line. In the same time period, DJFS offices in 10 counties failed to register a single voter, DJFS offices in 17 counties registered fewer than 10 voters, and DJFS offices in 32 counties registered fewer than 100 voters.

Thanks to ACORN,

The provision of voter registration services will be institutionalized within the office procedures at county DJFS offices, and both the SOS [Secretary of State] and ODJFS will make sure such services are provided.

Bradblog made this interesting observation:

There is an intriguing irony. Where the Right has gone out of its way to smear ACORN, it turns out that it was the government, under the control of a Republican Secretary of State, which had violated U.S. election law.* The Sixth Circuit noted that ACORN had suffered a loss because it was forced to expend funds on voter registration activities that it would not have expended had Blackwell and the DJFS complied with federal election laws; that ACORN's Ohio members were directly injured by those violations.