Foolishness

Drudge, Foxnews and the Hannity Forums are abuzz this morning about a story in the Tampa/St. Pete news (link no longer working) that this summer ACORN submitted a voter registration form for "Mickey Mouse" this summer. A couple points on this (and the general allegations of "massive fraud" by ACORN)-

ACORN is required by law to turn in all voter registration forms it receives. This law makes sense, because otherwise it would be too easy to register voters and then throw out the forms from people who you think won't support your preferred candidate. ACORN has registered 1.3 million new voters by employing 13,000 registration workers. Clearly when dealing with those numbers, you're going to get some number of jerks who fill out bad forms, and cheating employees who fill out forms themselves instead of doing the hard work of actually registering voters. ACORN must, by law, turn in those forms- and in fact they try to flag the bad ones for registration officials.

The second point is that, even if the Mickey Mouse form gets turned in, no harm is done. In this specific case, problems in the form were noted by election officials, and Mickey wasn't registered. Even if election officials mistakenly put Mickey on the voter rolls, he's not going to fraudulently vote because he doesn't exist.

Even if the Obama campaign were operating a Boss Tweed style 1860s campaign, and picking up homeless people in a van and driving them around to vote under fraudulent names, my guess is that Mickey still doesn't get to vote. Polling places are typically staffed by the same non-nonsense middle-aged women who proctor college exams- and these people are not going to let Mickey Mouse vote. Imagine some homeless guy (trucked in by the campaign) stumbles up to the table- "Hmm... Mr. Mouse? No, sorry, I don't think that Main Street USA, Tomorrowland is in this election district."

In short, while it makes a great headline, submitting a registration form for Mickey Mouse is what the law courts call "harmless error" and the ball courts call "no blood no foul"- and anyone carrying the story who knows anything about elections should call this "story" what it is- foolishness.