I saw a man not vote

Context
There was a long line at my polling place today at 6:30 a.m., so while I was waiting I had a chance to see an African-American man talking with the European-American guy who was the only election commissioner with a cell phone. It appeared to be the latter's job to check for other possible polling locations for those not registered in my precinct. He apparently found nothing helpful, because he sent the petitioner away with phone numbers for the parish registrar of voters and the secretary of state.

Commentary
I could talk about voter fraud and racism today because I think both of those might have been at play in the situation I observed, but it seems only fair to note what my husband said, which is that the African-American man might have been just inquiring about his polling place, not actually attempting to vote at that time. So I think I'll just focus on perception.

My perception of the situation today was, "that's what happens when we're concerned about voter fraud. People get turned away from the polls." Which led me to think about ACORN.

I'm embarrassed to admit I believed the soundbites about ACORN (sample here). I believed that some members of the organization had been so rabid about recruiting new voters for Barack Obama that they had filed fraudulent registrations in the hopes of somehow turning those registrations into actual votes. I also believed that external institutions had unearthed those registrations before the scam went too far along. I wasn't concerned about the situation for two reasons: 1) I know that many legitimate registrations do not translate to votes, and 2) I know that every organization that tries to do some good ends up with some bad apples.

Now that I've done some research at factcheck.org, I've realized that even my relatively benign beliefs about ACORN were incorrect. Most of the bad registrations in question were flagged by ACORN itself because after collecting them by state law they were required to file them. That's actually how we keep organizations like this from becoming partisan machines. They're required to file every registration, even the ones they'd rather not. More important to me, as perceptions go, is the fact that the frauds weren't perpetrated by people trying to influence the elections. They were done by people trying to make money without doing the requisite work.

So as I said, I'm embarrassed. But I'm more angry. I only found these things out today after I got started thinking about voter fraud and started to do some research. And the only reason I was thinking about voter fraud was because of the ACORN soundbites. After reading up on the situation and talking with my incredibly intelligent husband, I realized that I should have been thinking about why we pay people to collect registrations in the first place. Have we been making voter registration too difficult? Have we made the results of voting insufficiently valuable to be worth people's while (I'm a liberal living in Louisiana. Due to the Electoral College, my presidential vote almost never counts. Why do I keep showing up at my crowded polling place? Hard to say . . .)?

The above are important questions for us to consider. But we never will if we keep letting the soundbites guide our thinking. If we keep thinking it's nice legitimate voters vs. evil fraudulent voters or rotten people who want to disenfranchise the poor vs. saintly volunteer registrars going door-to-door. We need to change our perceptions. We need to open our eyes.

What did you see today?