Slate.com tries to understand why:
With voter registration coming to a close, the community-organizing group ACORN has become a major target of criticism by Republicans in recent weeks. On Thursday, Slate's John Dickerson reported that members of the crowd at a McCain rally in Wisconsin started shouting the organization's name as a rallying cry. When did a group more typically known for its minimum-wage and housing campaigns become such a controversial organization in national politics?
In the run-up to the 2004 election.
ACORN—that's the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—was founded in 1970 and has long been known for its activism surrounding local issues in urban areas. The group earned its fair share of criticism from the right over the years—not least for its controversial tactics, which have included disrupting a speech by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995. In 2003, Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern described ACORN as promoting "a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor."
These days, Republicans are accusing ACORN of committing widespread voter-registration fraud. The group has been involved in registration efforts since its early days, but that aspect of its work did not earn much criticism until recent years. In 1993, Newsday reported that the New York State Senate had held hearings over the legality of ostensibly nonpartisan voter drives conducted by ACORN and sponsored by the state's Democratic Party. In 1999, about 400 voter-registration cards submitted by ACORN in Philadelphia were flagged for investigation after a judge stated that "a cursory look would have suggested that they were all in the same hand." Meanwhile, the earliest example of registration fraud documented on "Rotten ACORN," a critical Web site put together by the Employment Policies Institute, comes from 1998—but that's the only case cited from before 2003.
Some people just don't like it when poor people vote.
