In last week’s campaign legal dust-up, Barack Obama and fellow Democratic senators complained that Republicans in Michigan want to disenfranchise voters who have lost their homes to foreclosure, on the grounds that they would not have legal residences. But if the Democrats hope to be taken seriously, they need to sever their ties with questionable groups that have been helping their voter registration efforts. Chief among them: the Service Employees International Union and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, both of which are enmeshed in scandal.

The Obama campaign has paid at least $800,000 to an ACORN affiliate for campaign work, and Obama himself has a long history of working with the organization despite the fact that ACORN has a deplorable record of turning in fraudulent voter registrations. Investigations of ACORN groups reportedly are pending in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and ACORN workers were convicted in Washington state last year for what Washington’s secretary of state called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history.”