ACORN at your door? Commander Obama's new secret mission

WOW... I think the band Buffalo Springfield had you in mind when it sang, "For What It's Worth"

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

ACORN is one of about 30,000 groups that have signed up as Partners with the Census Bureau.

Others groups include The American Statistical Association, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Avon Products Inc, FedEx, 7-Eleven, Family USA. The entire list of Partners is available on the Census Bureau website

http://2010.census.gov/partners/partners/current-partners.p hp

The Census Bureau's Web site includes an open invitation to sign on, and the agency says it expects to have more than 100,000 partners by the time the process is over. That may even be an underestimate: In 2000, it signed up 140,000 partners.

The idea that ACORN will be going door-to-door and gathering data is flat wrong.

Being "partners" with the Census Bureau doesn't entail as close a relationship as one might think. For the most part it involves getting the word out that it's important for everyone to participate in the decennial event that helps determine where federal money goes and how House of Representatives district boundaries are redrawn.

Each partner group is asked to complete a form listing a series of possible activities with which it would be willing to help. ACORN checked off, among other items, "identify job candidates and/or distribute and display recruiting materials" and "provide space to train new [census] employees." Form can be seen here:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2009/Census_AC ORN_Documents.pdf

At a hearing on April 23 before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke responded to concerns about ACORN's role voiced by a Republican senator:

Locke, April 23, 2009: [T]he Census will not be hiring anyone from ACORN. We use these so-called partners to get the word out and to spread the word about the need for people to respond and answer the questionnaires. ...We control the hiring. We do not use any government funds to subcontract with any organization to do any activity. ...We are not delegating anything to ACORN.


A Census Bureau statement, March 2009:

Any charge of claim that a Census Bureau partner could influence or have direct input into census operations is baseless and inaccurate. The sole entity that will conduct the 2010 census is the U.S. Census Bureau, along with its hundreds of thousands of dedicated workers. Further, the Census Bureau has strict quality assurance procedures in every operation to prevent the introduction of errors and/or fraudulent information into the national count.