GOP is attacking ACORN - and that's nuts

IT'S HARD NOT to see how ACORN would look like low-hanging fruit, so to speak, for an increasingly desperate Republican campaign.

Some of the most dismissive sneers by Rudy Giuliani and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the Republican convention came when they were talking about "community organizing" - which is what ACORN (the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now) does, and Barack Obama has done.

The two recent attacks on ACORN not only seem entirely political, but could have damaging side effects.

The first attack is almost too ludricrous to repeat: that the collapse of the financial markets should be blamed on the Community Reinvestment Act and on organizations like ACORN, because they enabled too many low-income people to get mortgages that they ultimately defaulted on, leading to a collapse of the financial markets.

Such a claim should be classified as an urban legend, alongside alligators in the sewer system.

The Community Reinvestment Act, enacted in 1977, forced banks to stop ignoring low- and moderate-income communities, or worse, discriminating against them. ACORN works in those communities to encourage home ownership, and it has fought the kind of predatory-lending practices that are in fact one of the key factors in the market crisis: subprime loans made to unqualified people, with huge fees and rates, expensive resets, and no financial accountability.

According to the Pennsylvania ACORN, the mortgages they help people get are 30-year, fixed-rate mortages, and all come with intensive financial counseling. Last year, the deliquency rate for its mortgages was 3.5 percent.

But it's the voter registration efforts of the organization that have became the recent whipping boy of the McCain campaign. During last week's presidential debate, McCain called ACORN's voter-registration efforts a fraud that could be "destroying the fabric of democracy."

That's because a small percentage of the million-plus applications it turned in after a massive registration drive were bogus or had ficticious names. But ACORN says not only is it required to turn in all applications its gets, but that they had flagged those that were suspicious.

Many of the people ACORN has registered are low-income. Those are often Democratic voters. Now, the Republicans are crying foul.

This appears to be a continuation of a crackdown on voter fraud that the Bush administration launched six years ago. But last year, the Justice Department found no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to the New York Times.

In fact, a year-old account in the Times makes the current allegations sound like deja vu all over again: "In what would become a pattern, Republican officials and lawmakers in a number of states, including Florida, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington, made accusations of widespread abuse, often involving thousands of votes . . . But the party officials and lawmakers were often disappointed. The accusations led to relatively few cases . . ."

Meanwhile, a decision in federal court will require Ohio's secretary of state to check over a half-million registrations in two weeks. That will surely translate into confusion, delays, long lines and voter suppression. And that - keeping people from voting - is the real sound of the democracy's fabric ripping. *