Today, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) released a report, ACORN and John McCain: The Real Story of the Financial Crisis 1999-2008.

While the report does not focus on the issue of the voter registrations that ACORN conducted, the issue of voter registration has been a key focus in the media recently and it is important to provide details about this effort. For this election cycled, ACORN registered over 1.3 million new voters in 21 states. They did this by employing around thirteen thousand people to go out help people register. Some quick number checks: ACORN used about half the number of employees that Lehman had when they went bankrupt. A quick number check shows that the average worker for ACORN would have helped a hundred people register to vote.

Make not mistake about it, this was a large effort. This effort included important checks and balances. The voter registration forms which were collected were reviewed and those that were found questionable were reported to the elections officials responsible in each state for verifying the eligibility of potential voters. In cases where ACORN had reason to believe that an employee was violating laws, they also reported this.

It should be noted that improperly filled out voter registration cards are not necessarily fraudulent. In some cases, people fill out multiple forms because they were not clear if they were registered, or simply because they have moved frequently.

Registration cards that are fraudulent do not necessarily imply that the person collecting the card was aware of or participated in an fraudulent registration. Having employees that commit fraud does not necessarily imply that the employer is aware of or participating in fraud. In ACORN’s case, it appears clear that they have worked hard to prevent registration fraud.

Beyond that, registration fraud does not mean that there is voting fraud. If a person who has fraudulently registered attempts to vote, that would be voting fraud, but there is no evidence of that.

Yet the attacks on ACORN have gone beyond its efforts to get low and moderate income people registered to vote. Some conservatives are claiming that ACORN’s effort to promote affordable housing has led to the housing crisis. They assert that the Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to make loans to people that couldn’t afford them. Unfortunately for conservatives, the data tends to indicate the opposite.

Earlier this year, Traiger and Hinkley issued a report The Community Reinvestment Act: A Welcome Anomaly in the Foreclosure Crisis, which found, among other things that banks participating in the Community Reinvestment Act were 66% less likely than other lenders to originate the types of loans that have been the primary driver in the foreclosure crisis.

In 1999, ACORN set up its Financial Justice Center in an effort to address issues of predatory lending that “that set homeowners up to fail and lose their homes and equity”. Since then, ACORN has fought hard to prevent the sort of lending that has led to the current financial crisis.

The report notes that:

John McCain's history with this issue is more difficult to document, mostly because there is not much history. In a search of mccain.senate.gov, which contains records dating back to 1988, there is not a single mention of predatory or risky practices in lending and only one mention of foreclosure, from a speech this March about earmarks in which he acknowledges that foreclosures are increasing. This level of engagement is far less than one would expect from a Senator representing the state with the third highest foreclosure rate, where one in every 182 households is in foreclosure1. By comparison, a search of acorn.org yields 479 hits about foreclosure and 737 hits about predatory lending. Nor is it the case that Senator McCain's website is just lacking information on his work – a search for "earmark" yields 240 hits.
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Indeed, in looking at the totality of their work, the only available conclusion is that ACORN fought with all its might for a decade to prevent this crisis while Senator McCain sat on the sidelines and cheered on the deregulation of the financial services industry that paved the way for the nation's economic collapse.