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From Sam Stein

On Monday, Obama's communication's shop is expected to go on the offense on issues of voter protection after a week in which Republicans cried foul about registration efforts in various states and painted the community organizing group ACORN as a criminal enterprise.

Obama aides will attack Republicans over efforts to disenfranchise voters in several states, and announce a voter protection campaign involving hundreds of volunteer lawyers around the country.

There's hardly an equivalence between a voter registration effort that turns in bogus applications and a large-scale scheme to suppress the turnout of legitimately registered voters. Republicans are going ape-shit over ACORN - and yes it sounds like there are serious problems in many of the group's registration applications. But those problems are the predictable, ultimately harmless (though, yes, criminal) result of registration pushes that offer incentives to workers for the number of people they sign up. Inevitably, some are going to foolishly seek that reward by filling out lots of applications falsely. That doesn't mean there will be *voter fraud* on election day, as if some cadre of bold liberals with a lineup of disguises will actually use those multiple registrations to re-enter their polling place again and again and hope the poll-watchers who are there all day won't notice.

No, if you want to commit crimes to truly influence elections you do it the Republican way, with a massive purge of registered voters. There are not 10,000 fools in battleground states prepared to vote 3 times each or whatever. But there may be 1 fool at the head of an election office prepared to kick 20,000 voters off the list improperly. That's the kind of fool that most concerns me.