Doug Hoffman blaming nonexistent Oswego County ACORN for "vote tampering"

Doug Hoffman recently sent an email to his supporters, claming that the recent special election in NY-23 was "stolen," and blaming ACORN and the unions for "vote tampering."

He specifically cites problems in Oswego County:

A recanvassing in the 11-county district shows Owens' lead has narrowed to 3,026. In Oswego County, I was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, but inspectors found I actually won by 1,748 votes

Let’s force them keep this recanvassing active! Let’s give this election a chance to end differently!Oswego County elections officials blame the mistakes on "chaos" in their call-in center that included a phone system foul-up, and on inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results. This sounds like a tactic right from the ACORN playbook.

I'm from Oswego county and my family and I have been very active in Democratic politics- my dad is an elected town judge, and my mom and in-laws have worked on a number of national, state and local campaigns within the county, and none of us have ever encountered ACORN staff or volunteers active in the county.

Moreover, the county government in Oswego and Jefferson counties is dominated by Republicans, and they use all the old-school patronage tools to make sure that county employees (like the ones staffing the polling sites) are good Republicans. These are also really small town places, where everybody knows each other - there's no way that ACORN (even if it existed in the district) would be able to have operatives sneaking around and fiddling with the voting machines without drawing the attention of the poll workers, who have probably worked together on the same crew for every election for decades.

Oswego County (and I believe other counties in the district) had brand new voting machines, and each machine covered multiple election districts, unlike the old manual machines that were one to a district. The new machines printed out a slip at the end of the night that listed the results for each of the EDs covered by the machine. My mom was working some of the polling sites for the New York Democratic Lawyers' Council, and told me that it would be really easy for the poll-workers to call in just the results from the first ED on the slip.

By blaming ACORN for his defeat, Hoffman is further showing that he's a creature of the national right-wing, completely tied up with national right-wing boogeymen, and just as completely out of touch with the realities of political life in NY-23 (perhaps because he's never lived in the district).