Having (possibly? momentarily?) decided to back away from the anti-Obama character attacks that we thought we'd see over the last weeks of the campaign, the McCain campaign is now pushing the idea that the race is going to decided by voter fraud committed by the voter registration group ACORN.

To use a favorite word of a certain vice presidential candidate, that's pure malarkey.

As People For has often pointed out in the past, voter fraud is an almost entirely synthetic issue, cooked up as an excuse to push restrictive voter ID laws. (Voter ID laws, of course, lower turnout among communities of color, the elderly, students, and working class voters.)

In response to the accusations, ACORN has created a useful fact sheet which contains some surprisingly interesting information.

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.