We recall the screech of protest from the right when Obama announced that he was drawing the census operation into the White House. The fear, of course, was that procedure could be jiggered and that was important because of the spending which turns on the data produced by the census as well as, as you point out, redistricting.
A Fox news report of March 8, 2009 puts it this way:
The census is an official count of the country's population mandated by the U.S. Constitution. It is used to determine distribution of taxpayer money through grants and appropriations and the apportionment of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Every U.S. household unit, including those occupied by non-citizens and illegal immigrants, must be counted. (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/17/lawmakers-concerned-role-acorn-census/)
What makes this curious is that there is a legitimate fear that Acorn will be employed in the census and they of course will operate as an arm of the Democratic Party, or more likely a brown shirt organization for Obama, and produce fraudulent results for the census as they did for the registration drives that they participated in which earned them indictments or legal problems in at least 13 states.
It becomes even more curious when one reads this article,Barney Frank--> ACORN's Public Defender (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2255648/posts) and learns that Barney Frank has been maneuvering to exempt Acorn from restrictions on receiving federal money.
This article posted today reports that plucky Michelle Bachmann has introduced legislation to prohibit Acorn from receiving money, which undoubtedly will not pass and will be spiked by Frank:Bachmann Introduces Taxpayer Protection and Anti-Fraud Act (anti-ACORN) (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2265080/posts).
The back-and-forth game being played by Bachmann and Frank indicate that there are real and important stakes involved.
To someone who is as suspicious as I am of Obama's Marxist ambitions for this country, I see this as one more chess move to undo our conventional electoral process so that we ultimately it will no longer have a recognizable representative democracy.
