As we approach the election, a phrase keeps coming to mind: "Scoundrel Time," the title of Lillian Hellman's memoir of the McCarthy red-baiting years.

Who are today's scoundrels? I'm afraid they include the McCain/Palin campaign, the Republican National Committee and their media allies who are accusing the community organizing group ACORN of voter fraud -- while, in fact, a massive fraud of voter disenfranchisement is being conducted by partisan election officials.

I've studied ACORN and groups like it for more than 10 years. ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is the nation's largest membership organization that organizes low- to moderate-income communities to gain better housing, open space, public safety, education and jobs. The group claims a dues-paying membership of 400,000 families across the nation and has local chapters in 87 cities.

Like most organizations, ACORN has made mistakes and is not perfect. But since its founding in 1970, no community group has done more to help disempowered poor and working-class Americans to help themselves.

ACORN has partnered with Project Vote, the leading voter registration group for relatively unrepresented groups. In 2004, the highest-income Americans were nearly three times as likely to vote as the poor, people of color and immigrants. The United States now features the most extreme income inequality since 1928. When the rich can buy votes -- through their campaign contributions and other means of influence -- while poor and working people don't vote, the risks to democracy are sobering.

So when ACORN registers hundreds of thousands of new low- to moderate-income voters, it's a great boon to democracy, right? But for the Republican Party, these new voters, who tend to vote Democratic, pose a risk in a tight election. So the right wing has pointed the finger at ACORN for "voter fraud" when, in fact, it is Republicans who are working to suppress the vote. Let me decode the misinformation.

Claim: ACORN is engaged in a national conspiracy to submit false registration forms.

Fact: By law in most states, ACORN must turn over irregular as well as legitimate registrations. In most states, only election officials can make the final call and throw out registration forms. When it yells "voter fraud!" the GOP is turning the facts upside down by claiming that ACORN's routine and voluntary cooperation in flagging suspicious registrations for elections officials is "fraudulent."

With any huge workforce (it took 13,000 workers to register all those new voters), some bad apples crop up -- in this case to make up names rather than do the hard work of finding new voters. But ACORN staff telephone all newly registered voters three times to verify their information. And invalid registrations are few relative to valid ones: for example, in Nevada, about 580 of more than 80,000.

Claim: Something must be wrong if workers are turning in bogus registration forms.

Fact: Lazy and unreliable employees exist in every line of work, but ACORN fires them when they are discovered and has eliminated some incentives to cheat: It pays field workers by the hour, not by the registration form, and it gives no bonuses for extra registrations. It trains and continuously supervises workers.

Claim: In the Oct. 15 debate, John McCain said "voter fraud" by ACORN is "destroying the fabric of democracy."

Fact: False registration forms do not voter fraud make. Voter fraud occurs during voting -- for example, when people vote multiple times. Today, this kind of fraud is difficult and rare. However, voter suppression -- for example, throwing voters off the rolls if their Social Security name has a middle initial but their voter registration does not -- has happened in at least six swing states.

Claim: "[Barack] Obama has a responsibility to rein in ACORN," Sarah Palin said in a Rush Limbaugh interview.

Fact: Mr. Obama has no formal connection with ACORN, hence no ability to "rein it in." The right wing is inventing all kinds of Obama ties to ACORN to associate him with supposed "voter fraud."

Claim: Charges of ACORN voter fraud are supported by many state officials.

Fact: This story was invented by the McCain/Palin campaign, the Republican National Committee and media allies such as Fox News. Even Republican election officials in swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Missouri and Texas have said they have had "no problem" with ACORN. The Republican St. Louis elections director, Scott Leiendecker, said about ACORN's voter registration, "Everything's been on the up and up." In the ongoing Department of Justice scandal, former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias said he was politically pressured to charge ACORN with voter fraud in New Mexico despite the fact that there was no evidence.

Claim: ACORN gets federal money for voter registration.

Fact: While some of its allied service organizations get federal money, neither ACORN nor Project Vote seek or accept federal funding. There is no federal funding for ACORN's voter registration campaigns.

The sad fact is that instead of Jim Crow and poll taxes, new, more clever techniques may prevent many poor, black and Latino voters from casting their ballots this year. On Oct. 8, The New York Times reported that many thousands of eligible voters have been purged from the rolls for dubious reasons in swing states. Now that's a crime.