Which is also irrelevant except that it is minor errors like that that make up the 200,000 mismatched registrations that Republicans are so hysterical over in Ohio.

If you can prove who you voted for, it is a lot easier for someone to buy or coerce your vote.

Sounds cold to me.

Being registered under the wrong party affiliation could be very annoying to the voter, and could affect what races they could vote on if they didn't notice the change before the next primary, but has no effect on their ability to vote for anyone they want in the general election. So the Republican Party is only paying YPM to register Republicans, and the company is tricking people into doing so to get money from their employer. Just as there is no advantage to ACORN to receiving in fraudulent voter registration forms, but a small number of their canvassers are doing so in order to get paid without doing any actual canvassing.

However, there are two major differences that make this case WORSE than the accussation against ACORN. First, as Zachary notes, this case involves the owner of the company, not street-level canvassers, submitting a falsified registration for himself in order to be eligible to vote in a state where he is not a legal resident. And even if he had no intention to commit vote fraud, which would be at least possible in his case unlike those of fraudulent registrations in the names of fictional characters or of famous out-of-state individuals, he was getting a specific advantage through his false registration.

Second, note that the Republican Party is only paying for Republican voter registrations. ACORN, and as far as I know the Obama voter registration drives, make no effort to screen out voters by party affiliation. They focus their efforts on particular demographic groups by virtue of where they conduct their registration drives, but then sign up anyone in those areas who wants to register.

I have been a regular reader of Dave Neiwert at his blog Orcinus and at Firedoglake.

He does an excellent job of covering issues of racism and neo-fascism. In this case, he has written about the links between the AIP and a number of other pro-secession groups including militias and white-supremacists.

I strongly hope that these officials face investigations and eventually charges of their own when this is over.

I found Zachary's post very useful for tying everything together.

I posted a reader blog about this early Sunday morning HERE. It made the recommended list on Sunday but then dropped off while the reader blogs were inaccessible later in the day.

The main point of the post was to point to an internal letter from ACORN directors, Bertha Lewis and Steve Kest, to political allies. I found this letter in Marc Ambinder's blog at the Atlantic

One critical point the letter makes is how many voters they have registered this election cycle and what demographics:

On Monday, October 6, as voter registration deadlines passed in most states, ACORN completed the largest, most successful nonpartisan voter registration drive in history. In partnership with the nonpartisan organization Project Vote, we helped register over 1.3 million low-income, minority, and young voters in a total of 21 states. Highlights of this success include:

We collected over 151,000 registrations in Florida, 153,000 in Pennsylvania, 215,000 in Michigan, and nearly 250,000 in Ohio.

An estimated 60-70 percent of our applicants are people of color.

At least HALF of all are registrations are from young people between 18-29.

They also have a factsheet with eight single-paragraph talking points to use to rebut the recent allegations and misinformation about their activities. This section covers most of the information in Zachary's post with additional details.

If you need a handy reference sheet to use when discussing this, I suggest you follow the link to the Atlantic and print out the ACORN letter.