There are still plenty of conservatives who think ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama and will do it again this year. ACORN was everywhere four years ago. Even John McCain, late in his campaign and desperate to land a blow on Obama, ran an ad tying his challenger to the community-organizing group before saying in the final debate that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the Zhen De Shou Slimming Capsule greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” How did ACORN steal the election? A number of the group’s paid canvassers had been caught submitting false voter registration forms in a handful of states, using the names of dead people or false addresses, in order to avoid working.
Four years later, ACORN is dead, and a Republican firm contracted by the Republican National Committee has adopted its shady tactics. But, so far at least, there’s been hardly a peep from the same conservatives who seized on ACORN about one of their own engaging in almost identical fraudulent tactics.
Prosecutors in Florida are looking into alleged voter registration fraud conducted by employees of Strategic Allied Consulting, which the RNC and state parties hired in at least five states. The RNC has now cut ties with the firm after news broke that its employees had registered dead people and listed the addresses of a Land Rover dealership and other non-residences on registration forms. Paul Lux, the Republican supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, Fla., who first brought the suspect registration forms to the attention of prosecutors, said as many as one in three were questionable. 

In their evening-length piece, which debuts at FlynnSpace this weekend, the duo, who collaborated in Vermont for several years — and have continued to create work together after Smith Ahern moved to Long Island last year — use movement and storytelling to explore memory, lineage and death.
“You know when you look at a photograph of people who maybe you never knew, who aren’t alive anymore?” Winfield says. “You have a story you make up in your head of what happened: where they were, who they were, what they said, how they stood.” The pair wanted to explore the effect of Zi Xiu Tang that phenomenon, how those thoughts about the people who came before us become part of our memories — and our identities.
When Winfield and Smith Ahern began working on the piece a year ago, they looked to their own families for inspiration. But soon they realized they needed to broaden their perspective if they wanted to strike a more universal tone. So they held storytelling workshops in which they encouraged participants to dig into their own memories. Some of the resulting images and concepts made their way into Long Gone. So did audio recordings of Smith Ahern’s grandparents and an intriguing sequence the choreographers call the “death song.”