I just glanced over at this post from B4B, titled 'Liberals Trying to Steal Ohio'.

I don't think the title is quite accurate. The post references an article from Newsday which states that two voter registration workers for ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) were fired after submitting fraudulent voter registration forms. The B4B poster (Paul Lewis) concludes that 'left wing Democrats are already doing their best to steal the election with voter fraud'.

No, Paul. If they were doing their best, they wouldn't have fired the workers who were attempting vote fraud. The fact that the workers were fired indicates that ACORN is in fact 'doing its best' to win the election by legitimate means.

It's understandable that Paul might feel a little defensive about this; after all, if the fraudulent registration forms had been submitted, it might have added a few illicit votes to Kerry's column come November. But I'm puzzled by the fact that neither Paul nor any of the commenter made an effort to emphasize how really bad vote fraud is by bringing up our nation's most notorious example of it: Florida in 2000.

For one thing, the state of Florida purged at least 50,000 eligible voters from its rolls because they had been convicted of felonies in other states. If you are convicted of a felony in Florida, then Florida revokes your voting rights permanently. However, if you are convicted of a felony in a state which restores your voting rights after you've served your time, Florida can't then take those rights away from you. Nevertheless, in 2000, that's exactly what happened.

As if that wasn't enough, they also purged voters whose names were similar to a felon's name. And this was all sanctioned and done under state law by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Can you imagine what kind of havoc that would have caused if the 2000 election in Florida had been close?

Thank goodness ACORN was wise enough to fire these two 'rogue agents' for their perfidy, lest Ohio in 2004 should become another Florida of 2000.

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UPDATE: I tried to make this argument in comments over at B4B, and I also tried to ping them with this post via trackback: no luck. But don't worry! I'll send them a nice email informing them that something is wrong with their site!