LA Times: ‘Florida elections officials said Friday that at least 10 counties have identified suspicious and possibly fraudulent voter registration forms turned in by a firm working for the Republican Party of Florida, which has filed an election fraud complaint with the state Division of Elections against its one-time consultant.”

Salon: “GOP’s ACORN moment: A Republican consulting firm allegedly commits voter registration fraud. Where’s the right-wing outrage this time?”

At this point I think it is important to draw a distinction between two kinds of things which might be going on, one much more troubling than the other.

One thing which may be going on is that the Sproul group hired people who filled in phony voter registration forms in order to keep their jobs.  If that’s what happened, it is a nuisance and troubling, but it is unlikely to lead to any problems at the polls.  Mickey Mouse is not coming to vote on election day, whether the form came from ACORN or Sproul.

But if what we see here is an effort to change people’s addresses to addresses out of the county, and this is being done to force those voters to use a provisional ballot (which won’t be counted because of the address problem), that would be a serious voter suppression issue and worthy of a much fuller investigation.

I’ve seen conflicting reports here on motives and types of ballots, and I think we need to learn more before we understand what’s really going on here.