Acorn 'n Company

The so called ACORN was a company that McCain brought up in the 3rd presidential election with Obama and McCain. With the original quote being “We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with Acorn [Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now], who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” So what is this “ACORN” company. Well not a lot of people knew what this was, including New York Times “Viewers may have been wondering what Mr. McCain was talking about. So were we.” New York times describes ACORN as “... a nonprofit group that advocates for low- and moderate-income people”(NYT) and “is a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights Organization”. It was involved with Katrina relief, education reform, and gun control [in which I think gun control means the use of both hands, but you can be the judge]. But the part that was talked about in this campaign was its voter registration drive that went on this year. McCain accused ACORN of using fake names such as “mickey mouse” and already registered voters.

John McCain also said that the FBI was investigating the biggest voting fraud in American history. In which is true in that a “senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of recent raids on ACORN offices in several states for any evidence of a coordinated national scam.”

So what went wrong and how much damage is there? The company claimed that some of the employees were paid to “phony names constitute no more than 1 percent of the total turned in”(NYT). In the end “Obama denied any significant ties to ACORN and mocked McCain for bringing it up.” In which he also stated that he only was involved with them for another reason, but never contributed again. McCain also came back with supposed facts that say that he funded ACORN further, along with Obama saying that it is not true.