Franken and ACORN Heating Up...

I enjoyed seeing Laura Ingraham on O'Reilly last night focusing on Franken and MN ACORN. I've been hearing a lot about a focus on ACORN in MN lately. Many of the MNGOP gubenatorial candidates want an investigation of ACORN, and there are rumblings out there popping up like bones in a swamp.

I read this over at KausFiles:

Did ACORN chicanery elect Al Franken? That's the import of this tactfully phrased Minneapolis Star Tribune column.** Franken won by 312 votes. ACORN claimed to have registered 48,000 43,000 ew Minnesota voters. If just 1% were ineligible but cast ballots, or had ballots cast for them illegally, and survived the recount process ... that's 480 430 votes, almost certainly overwhelmingly cast for Franken. ... Maybe in pristine Minnesota even ACORN is clean. If so, the state would apparently be an outlier. ...

**--Item originally said "story." It's a column. (I was thrown off by the byline, "Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune.") That makes no difference in Kirsten's argument, though Dave Weigel makes a fuss about it, and then bizarrely says it's a "smear" to even raise the obvious question of whether the voters--you almost want quotes around the word--registered by a highly questionable outfit like ACORN were legit and made a difference in a very close race. The most important question, I would imagine, is whether ACORN handled absentee ballots for anyone in the state. Would we trust an organization, whose registrations featured (in the NYT's words) "fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors" to distribute, collect, and maybe even mail in absentee ballots for, say, shut-ins at nursing homes? If there were funny business, would a recount necessarily have detected it (assuming the ballots were clearly marked)? ... That's more questions! Sorry! ... P.S.: There are also obvious potential problems with same-day-registration that might not be picked up on a recount. ... P.P.S.: In neighboring, also pristine Wisconsin, ACORN employed as voter registration workers felons "convicted of crimes including cocaine possession and robbery."

Carolyn Castore, state political director for the group, told the AP: “We have a lot of folks with felony records and, frankly, they need jobs.”

Update: Here's an example of funny business with absentee ballots, by a group joined at the hip to ACORN in New York. ... But I'm sure there's nothing to worry about in Minnesota.

Things seem to be heating up. Smoke...fire...developing...