For the past week, conservative news sources, mainly Fox News, have been pushing the bogus story that there is widespread voter fraud going on across the country, especially in the battleground states that Obama is cruising to victory in. The alleged culprit is the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), a group that registers low income citizens to vote. Fox News has mentioned ACORN 432 times since just last Friday, according to Media Matters, and the main headline on The Drudge Report all day today was “ACORN registered Mickey Mouse,” the insinuation being Barack Obama and ACORN are conspiring to steal the election by having people vote under false names.

When anyone looks at the charges, though, it becomes clear that not only is registering massive amounts of fake voters for actual voting purposes IMPOSSIBLE, but is a deliberate attempt to cast doubt on real registrations and perpetrate a much more serious issue, voter surpression.

Josh Marshall explains how ACORN conducts its registrations:

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What’s key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people — often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN’s own efforts to catch errors. (It’s important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it’s ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of ‘thousands’ of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

While John McCain has been trying to link Obama to this bogus story for the past two days, he neglected the mention he has been a long time supporter of ACORN, even giving a keynote speech at an ACORN event as recently as 2006.

This non-story, as well as Bill Ayers is all McCain has to cling to now that Obama has as much as a 14 point lead nationally and is on the public’s side on every major issue, from the economy, to Iraq, and now encouraging people to vote.

He can keep attacking, but it will continue to backfire. Tune in for the debate tomorrow to watch McCain dig the last few shovelfuls of dirt out of his grave.

Trevor Timm is a Blast Magazine staff writer