This just in: The Kansas City Star reports that Republicans in Independence, Missouri have accused ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) of submitting more than 250 voter registration submissions that appear to be inaccurate. This is called, “Voter registration fraud.”

ACORN has been in the headlines a lot recently, mostly because it’s where Senator Obama worked when he was a community organizer. But partly because Navada investigators raided an ACORN office in Nevada recently to seize documents to prove voter registration fraud, though there’s no evidence that Obama participated in voter fraud.

One thing that ACORN does is pay people to register folks to vote. When these voter registration folks do their job right, they do the voter-registration equivalent of baseball baptisms; i.e., they go find homeless people or people in mental homes and they register them to vote, so that other people can pick them up and truck them to the polls later to vote for the Democratic candidate (ACORN is quite liberal).

Seriously, they do this. My brother was an election observer in Ohio in 2004, and busses and busses of mentally retarded people were bussed in to vote. The people who bussed them in wanted to walk into the voting booth with them, and my brother prevented them, because that’s against the law when the people aren’t physically disabled. As a result, almost none of them voted, because they were too mentally disabled to actually complete the simple procedure. Guess who these mentally challenged people were being bussed in to vote for? John Kerry. (There’s some good humor to be made of that.) These folks who bussed them to the polls and wanted to go into the booth with them actually planned to use the voter registration of mentally challenged voters to vote multiple times.

When these voter registration folks don’t do their job right, they head to a library to sit in the comfortable, climate-controlled environment and find names to copy into the forms. When ACORN isn’t careful enough, these fraudulent registrations get submitted.

Some people want to make more serious allegations. They claim that ACORN wants fraudulent registrations so that they can stuff the ballot box and generally gum up the voting process. This appears to include former Senator Jack Danforth of Missouri, who circumspectly noted,

We are concerned that there is or may be a pattern of voting people who are not entitled to vote or otherwise gum up the system for registering voters.

Having illegitimate voter registrations allows for fraud in the absentee voting process. The New York Post reports that ACORN voter registration folks in Ohio get paid to harass people into registering multiple times. This leads to major voting problems. For example, In 2004, Franklin County, Ohio (which includes Columbus) had 817,000 registered voters, but just 815,000 residents aged 18 and over. These sorts of issues that prompt some lawmakers to favor voter identification cards, which are traditionally opposed by liberal organizations.

Next time somebody defends “community organizers,” keep in mind what they really do. The term “community organizer” a pretty name for a terrible practice; i.e., it’s just lipstick put on a pig.