Goodman: Who decides which Americans get to vote?

The 2008 presidential election may see the highest participation in U.S. history. Voter-registration organizations and local election boards have been overwhelmed by enthusiastic people eager to vote. But not everyone is happy about this blossoming of democracy.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has become a lightning rod for the right wing. ACORN's Web site notes that “the electorate does not reflect the citizenry of the United States of America. It skews whiter, older, more educated and more affluent than the citizenry as a whole.” Bertha Lewis, ACORN's lead organizer, told me: “We organize low- and moderate-income people, usually folks who are minorities - African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and working-class white people. And most of these folks have always been disenfranchised out of the electoral process. ... We've registered 1.3 million new voters across the country over an 18-month period of time. We had over 13,000 hard-working voter-registration workers. And we may have had a few bad apples, but I don't know any organization that didn't.”

Barack Obama himself was questioned about ACORN's problematic registrations. He said: “Having run a voter-registration drive, I know how problems arise. This is typically a situation where ACORN probably paid people to get registrations, and these folks, not wanting to actually register people, because that's actually hard work, just went into a phone book or made up names and submitted false registrations to get paid. So there's been fraud perpetrated on probably ACORN, if they paid these individuals and they actually didn't do registrations. But this isn't a situation where there's actually people who are going to try to vote, because these are phony names.”

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