There’s been a recent attempt by right-leaning folks to paint ACORN, a voter registration organization that focuses on low-income communities, as responsible for enacting large-scale voter fraud. While this is perhaps an attempt by the right to delegitimize a potential loss on Nov. 4th, it actually raises some interesting statistical questions about large-scale voter registration and registration fraud. Matt Yglesias begins the conversation here.

[I]f you go out and register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people and also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.

The fundamental problem here is that some on the right see it as a good thing that not all eligible Americans are registered to vote. (via advodude)