Dave,

Mea culpa, you're right. As a poll commissioner, I was recently instructed as to how one's address within the state of Louisiana would be irrelevant in the Presidential election, even though it would be an issue in local races. I was wrong to assume that a similar situation might exist nationwide across state lines.

I also agree wholeheartedly with your more recent post about the ACORN housing-aid operation.

I doubt that other local ACORN offices have been engaging in the same kind of fraud as that Neveda group appantely has. Of course, I'm sure that all of them will now be under some scrutiny.

In the first major local New Orleans election after Katrina, ACORN played an active role in transporting indigent evacuees back to town to vote. They supplied busses from, and back to, the major shelters and associated service-centers in Houston and perhaps a few other cities with high temporary populations of evacuees.

The people for whom this service was being provided were poor folk who had not been able to evacuate on their own, who had been stuck in the city for that hellish week or so during and after the storm, and who were then transported out of town by governmental agencies to vartious publicly-supported shelters.

No problem, perfectly legal, etc., etc. I couldn't and wouldn't object. Residency rules were, quite properly, more-or-less suspended during that period, when more than 80% of the area's population was displaced, in most cases temporarily. Anyone previously registered in New Orleans, and currently on the rolls as an active voter, could vote even if not currently occupying their flooded local address. Many middle-class folks traveling on their own dime came into town to vote, make a quick stop at their devasted home, and then go back to grandma's house or wherever they were temporarily residing.

After the election, I began to feel a little differently about the organized transportation of those indigent displaced persons. One or more of the local TV stations aired exit interviews with some of the bus-riding voters. Thery were asked "do you plan to return to New Orleans?" and many of them said "No." I was pretty unhappy about that ~ seems that the only reason many of these people returned to vote had nothing to do with their interest as local citizens and residents in how the city would be run. Their only motivation was to assure that a city in which they never planned to live again would NOT have a white mayor.

So, those are the people we can thank for the ridiculously incompetent C. Ray Nagin being reelected by a fairly narrow margin. I feel sure that his defeated opponent, Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, would be doing a much better job than Nagin is, had he won.