Shut up about ACORN already

This should be a fairly easy concept for people to digest. Voter registration fraud and voter fraud are two totally separate issues. And ACORN is guilty of voter registration fraud for sure. But we shouldn't feel so compelled to assume that the registration of ten thousand fake people will "steal this election from John McCain." Because I can tell you, with a large degree of certainty, that there is one thing that we can count on fake people doing...and that is nothing. Because they're fake. Mickey Mouse is not going to enter a polling station in Georgia to cast a ballot for Obama. Because he's not real. And not real people have a bad habit of never making it to the polls. And if Mickey were real, I'm sure he'd be voting Republican any way.

The starting line-up for the Dallas Cowboys were registered fraudulently by an ACORN employee in Nevada. And though they're certainly more real than Mickey Mouse and have the ability to vote, the chance of all of them collectively deciding to go vote in the battle ground state of Nevada on the hunch that they might have been fraudulently registered there seems unlikely, to say the least.

This ACORN excuse is yet another way that the McCain campaign is using veiled racism to scare their base into a frenzy. And dare I point out that McCain, himself, spoke at an ACORN-sponsored event as recently as 2006 in support of their efforts.

ACORN isn't stealing this election. And now with the hundreds of reports coming in every day from early voters across the country claiming that their straight Democrat votes on Deibold voting machines are coming up as McCain votes, I'd say we have a much more pressing voter fraud issue on our hands. Of course, all of these cases of potential machine malfunctions are occurring in precincts run by Republicans.

Their explanation? Voter error.

My recommendation? Take a video on your cell phone or digital camera while you vote to record exactly what's going on when you vote. Capturing even one occurrence of the described machine malfunction would irrefutably prove that we need to totally redesign our voting system. Because if even one machine proves to be faulty (which seems irrationally isolated in the scope of things) it puts the whole idea into question. We cannot have a voting machine that does not provide a paper trail. PERIOD.

How difficult is it? Deibold's ATM machines seem to be perfectly capable of providing it's customer with a receipt of their transaction. Printing out a filled ballot receipt seems like a pretty easy concept to get behind.

How have we not fixed this problem yet?

How can we call this a democracy?