The McCain/Palin campaign of hate and fear against Barack Obama, and its attempts to tie Obama to alleged vote fraud by ACORN, have resulted in a string of attacks on ACORN offices and staff including vandalism, hate calls, and at least one death threat.

As McClatchy reports, ACORN offices in Boston and Seattle were vandalized Oct. 16, and ACORN staff in Cleveland and Providence RI have reported telephone hate calls as well as e-mails including direct threats. A senior ACORN staffer in Cleveland, after appearing on television last week, received an e-mail saying that she "is going to have her life ended." Meanwhile, a female staffer in Providence received a threatening call from someone who directed racial slurs at her and said words to the effect of "We know you get off work at 9."

ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring told McClatchy that, since McCain's remarks accusing his organization of vote fraud, ACORN's 87 offices across the country have received hundreds of hostile e-mails, many of them containing racial slurs. "We believe that these are specifically McCain supporters" sending the messages, Kettenring said.

Right Wing Watch has obtained audio files of hate calls ACORN has received as well as copies of e-mails including threats and racial slurs. One young woman caller openly states that Barack Obama and other blacks should be lynched: "Barack Obama needs to get hung...," the young woman says, "...All the niggers on oak trees. They're gonna get all hung, honeys, they're gonna get assassinated, they're gonna get killed." A male caller, meanwhile suggests with obvious racial undertones that all "liberals" are "welfare bums" who "come to our country, consume every natural resource there is, and make a lot of babies." Accusing these "liberals" of sucking up welfare and health care benefits for their children, the caller continues: "I just say let your kids die.... And I hope you all die." In addition to the e-mail death threat from Cleveland cited above, an e-mail copied at Right Wing Watch says: "You blue gums are not going to steal the election. All of you porch monkeys need to go back to Africa."

As Rachel Maddow and others have reported and as ACORN itself has explained, any cases of voter registration fraud connected to ACORN are  most likely attributable to dishonesty on the part of people hired by ACORN to register voters (it's easier to fake registrations than go out and get real ones) rather than any dark conspiracy on the part of ACORN itself; and in any case is unlikely to result in actual voter fraud since fictional people are unlikely to show up on Election Day. As Maddow and others have also reported, Obama's only relationship to ACORN was as an attorney in partnership with the US Justice Department and the League of Women Voters in addition to ACORN to sue the State of Illinois for enforcement of the 1993 federal "motor voter" registration law.

John McCain, meanwhile, has his own links to ACORN as Maddow and others have also noted. McCain was in fact the keynote speaker at an ACORN-sponsored event in Miami on Feb. 20, 2006 in support of comprehensive immigration reform, which McCain once supported. A video of the event including McCain's address clearly demonstrates McCain's support for ACORN's objectives at that time: "What makes America special...," McCain's declares to an audience filled with with red-shirted ACORN members, "...is what's in this room tonight" (see also Politico, MarketWatch).

The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) is an organization dedicated to empowering low- and moderate-income Americans through voter registration drives, ballot initiatives, service delivery, and other organizing efforts. ACORN is not the sinister cell of subversives John McCain, Sarah Palin, and other Republicans have accused it of being. In fact, ACORN has frequently been on the same side as the federal government in voters' rights cases such as that in which Barack Obama was involved as an attorney-at-law.

Republican attacks on ACORN have nothing to do with voter fraud, and everything to do with smearing Barack Obama and with finding ways to stop likely Democrats from voting. These Republican attacks are nothing more than a grand voter intimidation scheme aimed at young voters, low- and moderate-income voters, urban voters and people of color who would most likely be voting Democratic on Nov. 4.

John McCain and Sarah Palin did not tell their supporters to vandalize ACORN offices or contact ACORN with death threats. In view of their continued insistence on the use of fear and hate to manipulate voters, however, and in view of the similar types of hate-based behavior we have seen at McCain/Palin rallies across the United States, I would argue that McCain, Palin, and the GOP are as responsible for these acts as the perpetrators themselves. McCain and Palin need to be held accountable for the lynch-mob mentality they have knowingly cultivated among their supporters with their own divisive rhetoric.