The 2010 census is coming up, as the Constitution requires. And since counting the population of one of the geographically least dense, but largest in terms of population and area, countries isn’t exactly an easy task, the US Census Bureau typically employs a number of organizations to help them with the counting by recruiting people; according to one FOX News report, approximately 1.4 million workers are required to get an accurate census of the population; this works out to about one worker for every 300 people. So obviously some outside assistance is needed. And according to the same report, one of the organizations the Census Bureau is working with is ACORN, famed among conservatives for supposed voter fraud (more on that below) during the 2008 elections. So naturally conservatives are reacting to this with varying degrees of concern, from utterly ignoring it to the outright crazy. Of particular note here is that Representative Bachmann is advocating not completely filling out the Census form, which may be illegal according to a Bureau worker mentioned in the article; the worker says that current census law mandates that all citizens fill out the form completely, not just provide the number of people occupying the building. Rep. Bachmann doesn’t seem to realize that the Constitution isn’t the only source of law that deals with the census. According to 13 USC section 221,

Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or willfully neglects … to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I, II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title … shall be fined not more than $100.

So Representative Bachmann doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. The questions are authorized, and so she has to fill them out.

I mentioned above that ACORN has been accused of voter fraud. While ACORN volunteers have engaged in voter registration fraud, the two are not the same at all. Voter registration fraud is fraudulently registering to vote, by registering multiple times or by registering a nonexistent person. Voter fraud is voting multiple times, and to my knowledge there have been no proven cases of ACORN engaging in outright voter fraud.

Moreover, according to factcheck.org, all of the cases of voter registration fraud were done simply so the volunteers could avoid work, not to throw the election; they even quote a (Republican!) prosecutor of one of the ACORN cases as saying that, “[A] joint federal and state investigation has determined that this scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting. Instead, the defendants cheated their employer, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN), to get paid for work they did not actually perform.” (emphasis mine.) So these allegations (which were even repeated by the McCain campaign!) were completely and utterly baseless.

So why are conservatives so eager to blame ACORN for the outcome of the 2008 elections and get all worked up about it possibly playing a role in the 2010 census? My guess is that they don’t want to believe that Obama could possibly have won the election honestly (the comparison to 2000 and 2004 escapes them!) and so there must have been some other agent to blame. They don’t think that ‘Real America’ would vote for someone who’s so obviously the wrong candidate; there must have been some outside agency influencing the vote’s outcome. McCain mentioned ACORN during the campaign repeatedly as a corrupt organization that, according to one McCain ad, engaged in “nationwide voter fraud”, and Obama did have ties to the organization, ties that he probably should’ve disclosed more fully. So conservatives took ACORN and ran with it all the way to the deep zone of crazy. The fact that ACORN typically champions liberal causes such as predatory lending, the minimum wage, welfare, and gun control doesn’t exactly help either.