In 2004, I worked for ACORN. I hired people and trained them to do voter registration. I didn’t pay by the registration, but by the hour. But, if someone could not consistently produce a decent amount of voter registrations then I fired them. Why pay someone to do nothing?

Because the people I had working for me were extremely poor, they had a powerful incentive to submit fake voter registrations. They were usually easy to identify by the handwriting, signatures, or other telling signs, like a lack of phone numbers. But I know that some slipped through and wound up at various boards of elections offices.

In the eyes of Karl Rove, this makes me a criminal.

One of the dismissed prosecutors has revealed that he was pressured by Republican officials to target the advocacy group ACORN for voter fraud. ACORN was working on a voter registration drive in low-income and largely minority neighborhoods in New Mexico. David Iglesias told Newsweek that he found no case worth bringing against ACORN. But that apparently did not please the White House. Last week Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s ex-chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson testified that during the run-up to the mid-term election White House adviser Karl Rove complained that Iglesias and two other U.S. Attorneys had not done enough to prosecute so-called voter fraud.

Obviously, a lot hinges on whether ACORN was engaged in intentional voter fraud (it wasn’t) and on whether voter fraud actually constitutes a threat to the integrity of our elections. The government has an organization to oversee these issues, called the Election Assistance Commission. They commissioned a study on voter fraud. But, they didn’t like the results.

A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.

Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats.

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

I’ve talked to many white, suburban people about the issue of voter identification laws and, generally speaking, they just do not get it. I mentioned before that I worked for ACORN in 2004 and that I hired poor people to do voter registrations. Most of my employees were from North Philly. They were poor, black, and young. Almost none of them had a driver’s license. Almost none of them owned a car. They had no real need for a photo ID unless they were old enough to go to a bar. Asking them to provide a photo ID at the polls is also asking them to make a special trip, long before election day, to the Division of Motor Vehicles and plop down $35 bucks that they cannot spare for a laminated card they don’t need for any other purpose.

You know what will happen? They won’t vote. And that is what Karl Rove wants. That is what voter ID laws are all about.

Well, what about those fraudulent voter registrations that ACORN submitted to the boards of elections?

Those registrations were fake. They were not real people. The addresses were made up. Or…they were people that were already registered. No one was going to the polls to vote as if they were these fake people. It’s a phony scare tactic used to discourage poor, urban people from voting.

The argument I get from white suburbanites is that anyone that cannot even be bothered to get a photo ID is probably too uninformed about the issues to deserve to have their vote counted. They don’t see that $35 dollars as a poll-tax because they need a photo ID for many of the things they do in life…like drive a car, take out a loan at the bank, sign their mortgage, use their credit card…etc. Young, poor, urban people do not do those things. They might wish they could, but they cannot.

If you do not live among the urban poor, you have to use a little imagination. And you’d be making a big mistake to think that the young, urban poor are uninformed on the issues. They know they’re getting screwed and they know who is screwing them. They want people to speak for them. They want to vote. And they deserve representation. They don’t deserve these deliberate attempts to disenfranchise them. They don’t deserve falsified government reports that hype a fraud-issue that doesn’t exist.