The American Pundit

Despite all of the attempts to register Mickey Mouse, the deceased, second-graders, and the Dallas Cowboys, the New York Times finds that the success of ACORN’s voter registration drive was greatly exaggerated. The actual number of real voters registered by the left-wing organization is about a third of the 1.3 million claim.

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.

In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly.

“We were wondering how many were Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse,” said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “The group is really tainted, and any work they do is suspect.”

As Ed Morrissy points out, that 30% figure is just what ACORN admits to being faulty. I’m sure that figure is actually larger and I’m sure all of the county boards dealing with their faulty registrations would agree.