[Link: www.opinionjournal.com...]

One of those states is Missouri. St. Louis election officials were so inundated with bogus Acorn-generated voter registrants that they mailed a letter to 5,000 registrants, requesting the recipients to contact them. Fewer than 40 responded. Mr. Rathke attacked the officials as “slop buckets” and claimed they had “broken the law in trying to discourage new voters illegally.”
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Acorn insists any problems stem from dishonest former employees. Mr. Rathke says he is actively cooperating with the probe in Kansas City, and has alerted prosecutors in other states about registration problems. That doesn’t satisfy Melody Powell, the Republican chairwoman of the Kansas City Board of Elections, who says Acorn’s claim that it brought the fraud to light is “seriously misleading.” She says her staff first took the evidence to the FBI, and Acorn only then helped identify the perpetrators. According to Ms. Powell, 40% of the 35,000 registrations it submitted appear bogus. “It’s a potential recipe for fraud,” she says, noting that “anyone can find a voter card mailed to a false apartment building address lying around a lobby and use it to vote.” Ms. Powell worries legitimate voters who were registered a second time by someone else under a false address will find it difficult to vote.
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Current and former Acorn employees say the problems in Kansas City and St. Louis are no accident. “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances,” says Nate Toler, currently head organizer of an Acorn campaign against Wal-Mart in Merced, Calif. In 2004 he worked on an Acorn voter drive in Missouri, and says Acorn statements aren’t to be taken at face value: “The internal motto is ‘We don’t care if it’s a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation.’”
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Still, Acorn is vulnerable to charges it doesn’t practice what it preaches. Its manual for minimum-wage campaigns says it intends “to push for as high a wage as possible.” But it doesn’t pay those wages. In 2004 Acorn won a $9.50 an hour minimum wage in Santa Fe, N.M., f