Okay, *now* I understand the Republican fascination with ACORN

It's to legitimize massive voter suppression efforts.  I hate the way my own government is making me feel like a paranoid conspiracy nut but...

Scary excerpts from a _Rolling Stone_ article here.

Short version. We don't just have to win, we have to win big. Because the Republicans have apparently been quietly disenfranchising Democratic voters with both hands, for quite some time. Some quotes:

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters.

- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls." Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.

If that 10 million voters thing is right, and there are about 72 million registered Democrats, the Republicans have purged about 1 in 7 Democrats from the rolls. Probably mostly in swing states; I voted this morning in Tennessee and had no trouble.

This may be tougher than I thought.

The actual Rolling Stone article is here.

More about it here.

Has any other Democrat out there tried to vote yet? Did you have any trouble? Did you see any one having trouble?