"What's been obscured amid all the polemics, or the polemics passing as news reports, is what ACORN is and does.
Founded in Little Rock in 1970 as an organization agitating for free school lunches, Vietnam veterans' rights and more hospital emergency rooms, ACORN has grown in the past four decades into the nation's largest community organizing group. Based in low-income neighborhoods, it has nearly 500,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in 40 states. Nationwide, it has more than 1,000 staffers.
What are the projects on which all these staffers and members work?
Raising the minimum wage, for one. ACORN conceived and led the successful initiative campaign to
raise the wage in Florida in 2004 and in four more states in 2006. In the past four years, it successfully pressured seven legislatures in other states to raise their minimum wage as well.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...AR2009092303679.html?hpid=opinionsbox1&sub=AR
Looking at the 647 stories on the group that ran in leading newspapers and broadcast networks in 2007 and 2008, they found that not only did a majority of such stories focus on allegations of voter fraud but also that
83 percent of the stories that linked ACORN to those allegations failed to mention that actual instances of voter fraud were all but nonexistent."
