yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/10/more_fraud.php
More Fraud So what about those made-up names on voter registration forms? Well, it's an inevitable consequence of ACORN paying people based on the number of names they bring in -- it creates an incentive for people to pad their lists.
explains: I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. They end up paying people for more registering people then they eventually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote.
numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated casing of actual instances of vote fraud. To repeat what I wrote before, what's always missing from these allegations of voter fraud is instances of fraudulent votes being cast. But if conservatives are really concerned about the integrity of the registration process, the thing to do would be to make registration much simpler and easier. With same-day voter registration, for example, there's little need to mount registration drives at all.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:00 pm Yep, it's important to understand that ACORN pays by the hour, and the cheaters they hire are using fake cards to cheat on their timesheets to get paid for work they didn't do. The fraud is against Acorn, and Acorn reports to the authorities -- by separately bundling suspect cards.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:05 pm Ambinder says, "ACORN is required by law to turn in every completed form -- even if they're obviously fraudulent. ACORN insists it has procedures in place to flag these forms, but you can't blame supervisors of elections from throwing up their hands when they come in." I don't understand what that "throwing up their hands" is supposed to mean. It's easy to see why a private group is required by law to turn in all forms. Otherwise the group could suppress the registrations of people who would be likely to vote for a certain party. And given the high percentage of morons in our society, there are always going to be idiots who agree to register and then put "Bugs Bunny" or "Mister Clean" on the form. Obviously they're not expecting to vote under those names. So, okay, ACORN has to turn these forms in, but it flags them so that the supervisors can reject them. Why should they "throw up their hands" when it's time to do it?
October 10th, 2008 at 6:10 pm Even when paid by the hour, people who are paid to get registrations are expected to get their numbers. It's not cost effective for ACORN to have someone out in the field all day, pay them for the day, and only get 10 registrations. So fraud against the company will still happen by people afraid of getting fired if they don't collect enough signatures. I've worked for a company that does signature gathering for petition drives, and voter registration drives, and pays by the hour. People get lazy, take long lunches, or just sit down and don't work for an hour in the middle of the day. Then they create false signatures/registrations to cover for it.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:16 pm Acorn does pay by the hour, but if you're a guy who just slacks off and doesn't get any forms filled out, they're gonna notice at the end of the day that you're not turning in any forms! So, duh, the slackers fill out forms with fake names, or just copy all the same forms they'd legitimately gotten filled out the day before, or have their idiot friends fill them out, or whatever. If you say you're knocking on doors to get people to register on a certain block and you don't actually do it, they're kind of screwed when they or anybody else tries to get out the vote on that block on election day. And what's more annoying is that the guys making these BS accusations are political professionals and they KNOW Acorn is getting ripped off. They have been in this situation where somebody lies to you about getting the job done, and they KNOW it sucks! They KNOW that's a the worst kind of problem for any field operation trying to win elections. You wasted time, you wasted money, and you got bad information. It's really disgusting that they'll go up and lie about this. But they don't care, because they get to say the word "fake" and pretend there's some kind of vast conspiracy of poor people stealing elections.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:17 pm The right is always trying to supress the vote. I don't know anything about these acorn folks, and only heard about them a couple of days ago.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:27 pm OK, thanks for the input everyone. Matt, I think you should edit the line, "Well, it's an inevitable consequence of ACORN paying people based on the number of names they bring in," to something that isn't false. I'm afraid that the essential point-that registration fraud and vote fraud are very different in occurrence and degree of harm-is likely to be lost behind layers of race- and class-based innuendo.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:34 pm We need laws that make it illegal to hire people to register people to vote. Either that, or we need to make sure that if you're paying people to get citizens to register to vote, that they can only register real patriots, meaning white Republicans. That is obviously to only fair way to stop this massive, massive registration fraud which has totally threatened this country with the possible victory of a black man.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:36 pm I would compare this to the paid signature gatherers here in Washington State. When an initiative is put on the ballot the signatures are usually gathered by people being paid by the signature. There is an incentive for the gatherers to get as many signatures as possible. I usually decline to sign, but if I was annoyed enough it might be tempting to put pen to paper and write "Mickey Mouse" or "Tim Eyman" or something. More often I think you'll find duplicates, underage people, and people who live outside the relevant districts. In fact, all initiative sponsors plan on a certain percentage of signatures being declared invalid by the Secretary of State (or other election officials).
October 10th, 2008 at 6:37 pm NIinNY posts perhaps the funniest thing I've read here: My job isn't reporting. MattY is about as far from a (real) reporter as anyone could get. If anyone wants to do some real reporting, find out who started the "ACORN is a victim" charade. Did it start with an ACORN flack, or an MSM "reporter" or blogger? As for MattY's proposal, it's akin to saying that if we just declared nothing to be cheating then there wouldn't be cheating at all.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:42 pm With same-day voter registration, for example, there's little need to mount registration drives at all. Registered people are much more likely to show up at the polls, and if no one preregisters the lines are going to be miles long and people won't bother. Same day is awesome, but registration drives are still important.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:43 pm The county officials are "throwing up their hands" because of the volume of registrations being submitted. There is a huge drive right now to get people to participate in our democracy and it is working. Whether that is because of the candidacy of Barack Obama, because of dissatisfaction with George Bush, or because of enthusiasm about Sarah Palin is not really material. The voter particpation rates in this country should be national shame. Get out the vote drives are one of the most patriotic things you can do.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:53 pm Why do we even let lower income black people register to vote? Shouldn't Republicans be able to administer some sort of loyalty test before those people are allowed to try and vote for that one?
October 10th, 2008 at 7:01 pm I'm NIinNY (typo in the first post). Their name is being sullied and their funds depleted, with no benefit to their organization. Or do you think they're trying to pay people to register imaginary citizens who will never be able vote because of their imaginariness and then flagging dubious regist...
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