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Monday: RFK Jr. on voting...

On Monday, a week and a day before the election, we're going to look at the still swirling controversy over the integrity of the vote, from the right and the left. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will join us.

He's just written, with Greg Palast, a new piece for Rolling Stone charging the GOP with a campaign to "deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots." Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund will also join us. He wrote the 2004 book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy" and has been writing recently about investigations into Acorn's voter registration drives. To help us sort it all out we'll have election law expert Nathaniel Persily of Columbia University.

The Acorn controversy has been hot enough, but it may only get hotter. As The New York Times reported today in a front-page story:

... the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly....

Democrats and officials with Acorn accuse Republicans of trying to manufacture a controversy to deflect attention from alleged voter suppression activities in several states. Election officials and experts say there is little chance that significant numbers of supporters of either party would actually try to vote through a fraudulent registration.

Over the last few weeks, the Acorn registration drive has become a flash point in the campaign when the flood of new voter registrations prompted complaints from election officials about the high number of improper submissions. State and local officials have begun investigations into possible fraudulent activity in at least 10 states.

And even setting aside the highly charged questions of fraud and suppression, all it could take is a snafu in a closely fought battleground state to throw the election into the courts, as the WSJ noted today.

So tune in and join the conversation. What are you making of all this? Do you have confidence in the voting process itself? Are these accusations, on both sides, overblown? Or is the vigilance called for?

See you Monday.

This program aired on October 24, 2008. The audio for this program is not available.

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