ACORN submits fraudulent voter registrations en masse

Great Debates
181 
I think I can safely say nobody is against the State providing for the mentally disabled or for any variety of the truly disabled.

I agree. I’ve mentioned in other threads that it’s a political hot potato to go after programs for the poor. Can’t remember who said it but I heard a Congresswoman say that HUD was doing an excellent job meeting it’s quota. WELL DUH. The more unqualified people put into houses the worse the problem. I’m not hugely invested in blaming parties. People screwed up, it needs to be fixed. Go into a room, figure out how to jointly take the blame and FIX IT.

I keep forgetting to mention the local connection. You’re absolutely right. The money is administered locally. There’s a whole other level of accountability to deal with.

And it didn’t occur to me to think in terms of fraud. I’m assuming that people can prove their lack of earnings. What they’ve amassed in personal possessions wouldn’t enter into this.

182

Well SOORRRYYYY (seriously). your cite followed the statement and was in the next sentence which started with “and in addition”. I thought you were quoting from the original article. Nice of ACORN to leave out the bit about reprimanding people who didn’t make quota.

183

I have a sharp pointy stick for them to sit on too. If there is fraud on how the mortgages were bundled and resold then I’d like to be first in line to shove the stick further.

184

You may have tried to qualify your position with the word “unqualified” but you did not define it.

As noted before the CRA has been in existence since 1977. Somehow we muddled through 30 years without tanking the economy with that in place.

There is nothing wrong with risky loans on the face of it. The question is how risky is reasonable and providing transparency to everyone down the line about the risk they are really facing if they choose to buy up that risk.

The market did not stop the really bad loans as it should have. If they knew the risk that (taking liberties here) an unemployed, ex-convict, crack addict who has never held a job was being given a loan the people who wrote it would never have been able to pass along the risk. Hence no one would write those loans.

Unfortunately there was a means to bundle the crack addict loan with many others and wash the info out of the system so people were buying the risk with no real idea what the actual risk was (partly you can thank the ratings agencies for that who rated these things as safe buys).

There is a lot more to it all of course but the root of the problem was not giving loans to poor people. That can be done safely and to good effect when done responsibly which it (generally) had been for some 20+ years till deregulation opened the flood gates.

185

What a pity. Perhaps all of this could have been avoided if only the banks and mortgage companies had someone to speak for them in the halls of Washington! Someone who could lift the Birkenstock jackboot of ACORN from their necks!

But, alas, they were not heard. Shame! Shame, I say!

Who speaks for them, the defenseless, who have nothing but buttloads of money and whatever meager power *that * can buy. Who is brave enough to stand for them, the rich and powerful? Who, indeed?

Crushed in spirit by the iron fist of the left, forlorn, abandoned, they wrote the mortgages. Perhaps if there had been a break, a hiatus, in the decades long tyranny of the Democrats, they might have been heard. But no. The impoverished and disenfranchised needed only to make their will known, and Congress trembled, and obeyed.

186

Now it’s happening in Missouri.

And in Connecticut.

And in Wisconsin.

And in Indiana, which contains Marion County, where, incidentally, 105% of eligible voters are registered. ACORN reps dropped off 2000 registrations in Lake County, 1100 of which were no good. That’s very different than 300 out of 80,000.

I don’t think “en masse” is out of place at all.

187

Those are insignificant numbers in terms of any hypothetical effect on the election. And they’re getting filtered out anyway. We still don’t have anyyone caught voting illegally.

188

All this tempest in a teapot outrage probably has nothing to do with the fact that with the exception of CT, these are all potentially red states that are leaning blue…

189

Having a hard time getting this conspiracy to gel. Leaving aside the repeated assurances from the ACORN people themselves, that they were duped and ripped off (and we must, if we are ever to arrive at the corner of Dark and Conspiracy…)

We are left with several hundred illegitimate registrations. OK, then what?

Do they recruit ringers and stand ins to vote under these false colors? How many, recognizing that the more people are party to a Dark Conspiracy, the more likely you are to get narked. So, what? Maybe twenty to fifty committed radical Acornistas? Running madly from polling station to polling station? Careening around corners in Volkswagen buses? And for what?

A few hundred, maybe a thousand fake votes? They do all of this in the expectation that the race will be so close, they can steal the election with a few hundred votes?

This is the point where the Army guy from Monty Python closes down this conspiracy theory, because its getting very silly.

(Anectdotal aside, bearing no evidentiary import…)

I worked for a foundation that gave money to ACORN. Oodles of it. Got to know some of them when they came round to beg. Nice folks. Single outstanding characteristic was a daunting earnestness, symptomatic of tofu overdose. The idea of those people in a Dark Conspiracy is droll and chucklesome.

And intimidating thugs? It is to laugh…

190

“En masse” is out of place.

Have you read those articles? Can you not see them for the smoke screen they are?

First let me say I am totally opposed to voter fraud of any sort…I don’t care if it helps “my guy” or anyone else. It should be opposed and busted at every turn.

That said let’s try this…

  1. In every article you cited it is a matter of several hundred votes out of tens of thousands. Even in 2000 in Florida I think Bush won by 500 votes…not one of these would have turned even that remarkably close election. The chances of such a close election are vanishingly small.

  2. Occam’s Razor: A national conspiracy to do voter fraud on a national level by pushing in 300 or so votes in each of the states? Or chances of vote-getters being lazy, making mistakes, staying at home to get stoned and make-up names?

  3. Occam’s Razor-2: Leaders of these organizations risk prison to nab 300 votes in a variety of states? Or they hired people who would rather smoke a bong than beat the streets and/or people fill out their forms incorrectly?

  4. As has been noted signing people up means nothing. You could put a bazillion people on the voter rolls…means nothing till they show at the poll and vote. Granted “registering” them has to be a first step but now you have to expand your conspiracy to hundreds if not thousands of people to roam one place to another and vote using those fraudulent votes. How would you expect to keep such a thing a secret with enough people to remotely make a dent?

  5. Imagine doing voter registration yourself. Would you be cool doing that if you knew the FBI would come crawl up your ass if you wrote some records out of thousands down wrong?
    And on it goes…

This would be something if it remotely made a difference. It doesn’t…not even close. It is another smear and provably so.

191

“No good” doesn’t equal “fraudulent.”

Despite someone’s (LaSota? The Times?) blurring of distinctions, submitting incomplete or illegible forms (describing the 1,100 forms) is not at all in the same class as pulling names from phone books and forging signatures (the actions of “some” canvassers).

192

Yes, but do you decry them? Why have you left them undecried if you have no agenda?

193

Some ACORN workers were paid by the name. To pad their checks ,some made up names. That does not translate into voting fraud since the person does not exist. As usual a lot of noise.

194

I,** Gyrate**, do abjure, abrade, accuse, admonish, attack, berate, blackball, blame, boycott, cancel, cashier, cast away, castigate, censure, chastise, check, chide, comminate, condemn, contemn, criticize, decline, decry, defy, delate, denounce, deny, disallow, disavow, discard, discount, disdain, dismiss, disown, dissent, eject, eliminate, excoriate, execrate, forsake, forswear, fulminate, inveigh, jettison, jilt, knock, lambaste, lecture, objurgate, ostracize, rail against, rebuff, refuse, renounce, repel, reprehend, repress, reprimand, reproach, reproof, reprove, repudiate, repulse, restrain, scold, scorn, scrap, slight, snub, spurn, stigmatize, upbraid, veto, and vituperate all those who would seek to register false voters or discourage or disenfranchise legitimate voters, particularly those who do so with deliberate intent and/or malice aforethought.

I’m also a little miffed by the “Right” people here complained that the “Left” people here deliberately ignore malfeasance by organisations and people with whom they are sympathetic, given that by and large this has not been the case in this thread (I’d like to say that it hasn’t happened at all but sadly I’m not sure that I can). Saying that Bricker’s OP was misleading in implying a deliberate campaign of voter registration fraud and that 300 false ballots is not statistically significant is not the same thing as saying that “it didn’t happen” or “it doesn’t matter”.

Back on (the new) topic: I don’t agree with voter IDs, partly because it adds another barrier for legitimate voters, partly because I am utterly unconvinced that it will be an effective deterrent to voter fraud (because, you know, IDs are always unforgeable), and partly because I live overseas and vote via absentee ballot and would prefer not to have to travel 14 hours each way to cast my vote.

There has been an ongoing debate in the UK about national ID cards, with the Government making a variety of claims about their benefits: they’ll prevent terrorism, they’ll stop illegal immigrants, they’ll prevent benefit fraud, etc. In all cases these claims have been shown to be rather questionable given the proposed implementation, and with a massive added bureaucracy and cost attached. Voter IDs don’t seem that different.

I’d rather that a small number of false votes slip through than real voters be barred from voting. Of course I’d also rather that electronic voting machines be banned on the grounds that all votes cast must be inspectable and recountable, and all voting systems accountable, but that’s just me.

195

No one’s talking “conspiracy” here. We’re talking about ordinary political corruption. As I remarked before, are accusations of conspiracy thinking, like accusations of racism, going to become a new way of avoiding the dreary necessity of discussing facts?

But this is an opinion piece by an anonymous poster on the Internet. Unlike Garlock’s editorial column, the information presented here is impossible to verify, and strangely enough, the poster never mentioned this before even though the experience would be highly relevant to the discussion. Moreover, the poster is clearly extremely prejudiced. A partisan Democrat, in fact. Obviously this information has to be discounted.

A sneer is not an argument.

196

I didn’t read the whole thread; I agree that registration fraud is serious business and it disgusts me that it happens.

I have a very serious legal, question, though. I ask this in good faith, knowing that Bricker, and some other dopers, are attorneys, and this is not meant to be a loaded question.

Does requiring a photo ID to register violate the spirit of ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Are we throwing away one sacred American value in the name of protecting another? Where is ‘innocent until proven guilty’ codified? I imagine this couldn’t be argued under the 5th amendment, or could it? Are you essentially being asked to prove you’re not committing a crime when you have to present a state-issued photo ID to register to vote?

197

It’s extremely difficult for me not to see this as a partisan issue. The call for a national ID or use of existing photo ID will tend to disenfranchise predominantly those voters more likely to vote along Democratic lines. The Australian press, looking at the US elections from outside, see this pretty clearly:

Years ago we had the same arguments about the “motor voter” registration. Republican vehemently opposed the use of Voter Registration at Motor Vehicle Bureaus, saying that it wasn’t the responsibility of the MVB to have anything to do with the electoral process. There was nothing illegal or fraudulent about this – but both sides evidently saw the Motor Voter initiative as more likely to snare democratic voters.

In truth, nobody has shown that there has been any significant voter fraud in any election (as the above quote points out, not in Australia, either), and the sudden concern about it seems awfully suspicious, especially when the zealous response of states like Florida in the 2000 election resulted in the disenfranchisement of large numbers of legitimate voters.
What is truly unbelievable is the ham-handed way the US has been trying to “fix” this problem. Our partisan-controlled election officials (it boggles my mind that Florida’s Secretary of State, in charge of the 2000 Elections, could also be head of the Republican Election Campaign) and our patchwork system of ballots and accountability invite tinkering. It certainly confuses people overseas. To quote from that Australian article again:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/voting-system-is-haunted-by-democratic-meltdown/132201.aspx

Voter ID need not be the absurd issue it’s trumped up to be. The US operated without it for most of two centuries. Other countries do without it. Mexico has a Voter ID card, which too many people are against in the US, but why must there be some single card required? People here argue about whether a card is allowable if it’s no charge, or if all obstacles are cleared, but Canada solves the problem using three options:

You can use1.) A single piece of government-issued ID, or 2.) two approved forms of ID, one with a photo, or 3.) An elector, with his/her own acceptable ID, can vouch for you. Those would seem to cover most cases, and the few who couldn’t get in on those would be a distinctly small group.

Of course, there’s no system that someone won’t or can’t try to hack, or make it appear as if someone is trying to hack. If all else fails, we can use the system we supervised so diligently in low-tech Iraq after we swept Hussein out — you can dye everyone’s thumb purple after they vote. There’s a low-tech solution that will keep scurrilous voting fraudsters from voting twice!

198

One in 10 Americans do not have government IDs. One in 5 blacks do not have government IDs. They do not drive .
Many live out in the country and they do not have easy access to government offices. IDs cost money and many people are broke.
Voter fraud has never been a big problem except in repub dreams. David Iglesias was fired for not prosecuting voter fraud cases. He said he had none.

199

How so? With an error rate of a few hundred per tens of thousands, it seems to me that we’re talking about not much of anything.

Overly enthusiastic, and illegal purging of the voter roles seems a far larger issue:
States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal

200

Of the different constitutional arguments that may be leveled against voter ID requirements, “Innocent until proven guilty,” is not one.

Do you imagine that if you’re pulled over by the police, he may not ask you for your license because driving without a license is a crime, and, hey, “Innocent until proven guilty!”