Adding injury to the insult

Last Wednesday night, somebody stole a bunch of computers from the ACORN office in Dorchester. Now the Boston branch of the 30-year-old national organization looks even more run-down than usual, with long white wires hanging forlornly from a hole in the wall where the thieves pulled out a burglar alarm.

But the robbery wasn't the worst thing to happen to ACORN that night.

That came from GOP nominee John McCain, who on national television accused ACORN of being "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

That wasn't the first time the ragtag, grassroots community organization has been the object of such ire. For weeks, Republicans have pilloried ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - because of its work registering 1.3 million voters, mostly young and minority, across the country.

In some states, thousands of the registrations sent to elections officials turned out to be fake. Obviously bogus names - those of the Dallas Cowboys, for example - were turned in by temporary workers hoping ACORN would pay them $8 an hour for work they didn't do. ACORN fired them instead.

The Republicans have seized upon this as proof that ACORN is trying to steal the election through massive voter fraud.

Sounds pretty serious, right?

Only it's not true.

Voter registration fraud isn't the same as voting fraud. If somebody registers Groucho Marx to vote in Ohio, that's voter registration fraud. But that doesn't affect the outcome of an election, unless somebody shows up at the poll with the glasses and the moustache and the cigar and tries to cast a ballot. That's voting fraud, and it almost never happens.

In fact, between 2002 and 2005, the Department of Justice convicted only 26 people of voting fraud, most of them for voting when they were ineligible, said Lorraine Minnite, a political scientist at Barnard College who has studied the records.

Still, ACORN is getting major grief. Even though many states require them to submit even suspicious-looking registration forms, and even though they flagged them for elections officials as problematic.

And even though Massachusetts ACORN has registered only about 700 people, none of them fictitious, the workers on Adams Street are getting plenty of grief, too. Nasty e-mails have been pouring into the organization's inboxes.

"You're committing voter fraud, and you're going to prison," reads one.

And this: "standard dumb [n-word] muslims."

Nice.

ACORN is not without its problems. Its founder recently resigned after it was revealed his brother had embezzled almost a million dollars from the organization. And they get in people's faces. When negotiations to prevent foreclosures have failed, ACORN workers have tried eviction blockades and confrontations in lenders' offices.

But they do some great things for their members. They get residents help with trash pickups and broken streetlights and overgrown vacant lots. They offer loan counseling, and try to prevent foreclosures, and connect poor residents with services.

Nobody knows whether there's any connection between the robbery and the drubbing ACORN has been taking in the closing weeks of this presidential campaign, but it's a rotten coincidence.

The computers will be replaced. It will take longer for ACORN to recover from claims that it is undermining democracy.

"This is very painful," said Maude Hurd, ACORN's national president and a member of the Dorchester branch.

To anybody who looks at the facts, the voting fraud accusations are as bogus as those phony registrations.

But McCain is making like Groucho: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is Abraham@globe.com.