Trump wasn’t the first Republican to Claim Voter Fraud

How doubt in the electoral process was planted a decade prior to the 2020 election

Credits: Unsplash

Many people have long forgotten about the 2009 ACORN controversy, but at the time, Republicans built it up to be the greatest political scandal of the decade. It helped plant the seed that our election system was heavily flawed, instead of acknowledging the fact that voting opportunities have expanded to countless factions of the public, who lacked these rights in prior decades. The scandal also provided legitimacy for politicians to make baseless accusations of voter fraud, if you lost an election, even though, voting has becoming progressively safer over the years.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was a non-profit company which provided a plethora of services to low and middle income families, like assisting with health care, registering them to vote, and social work. The company had operated for four decades before being forced into bankruptcy. So what did the company do that stirred so much fear of voter fraud? Employees got paid to register low income voters, but since the work was hourly pay and not based on performance, many people forged documents. Long story, short: ACORN workers did some shady stuff to inflate their voter registration numbers, got…