No difference, I simply don’t think it should be up to “get out the vote” campaigns by any private advocacy groups to have people registered. I think they can educate people, I have no problem with that, but to have them literally collecting voter registration cards and handing them in, whether it is ACORN or the Young Republicans, just doesn’t taste right to me.
None, actually. What I was trying to say was the only time it would be justified to increase voting requirements would be when it fixes an actual distortion at a lesser cost (e.g. if districts routinely reported 150% voter turn out, then something needs to be done, even if it decreases legal turnout by 5%). In this case, to the best of my knowledge individual voter fraud (people showing up and voting fraudulently) is such a minor issue that any remedy would need to have basically no effect on legal turnout
Well, I remember voter fraud charges of this type in both 2000 and 2004. They just didn’t glom onto ACORN as the root of all evil. Without Obama, I suspect it would have been presented as more a systemic, we need to do something thing, rather than an effort to fix the election in any specific direction. In fact, it would probably play better if it could be presented as a high minded, “anyone could do this, so why wouldn’t the other side be as worked up as we are?” type of way.
Jonathan
Raygun99 and Gangster, it isn’t up to those groups to register people. Anybody can go to Town Hall and register themselves if they want, and that’s even the normal method.
All ACORN, or any other registration-drive organization, does in the US is pass out the forms and help turn them in to the relevant municipal government. They’re just facilitators in the process, not official participants.
From what I know of the culture (during my days as a community organizer), there is some truth in this, in that ACORN serves neighborhoods where people have some patchy backgrounds, and the workers, as a rule, do not ask a lot of questions about a person’s history unless it’s relevant, but it’s basically “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They are not instructed to simply ignore people who are brazenly confessing to crimes, especially not crimes as egregious as child prostitution.
May I ask why? The truly indifferent will never vote anyway. Is there a problem with having more people who are legally eligible registered?
Jonathan
Absolutely.
I don’t really have a problem with it myself. A person is much more likely to register to vote if they can fill out a quick form at the booth or wherever when the thought is at the top of their mind. If they have to register on their own, they’re much more likely to go “Yeah, you’re absolutely right, I should register,” to the advocacy group they’re talking to and then immediately forget about it.
It’s giving rewards for the number of registrations turned in that prompts the fraud. Personally, I think if you’re going to advocate, the job should be its own reward.
That is what I would suspect, and what I gave as the most probably scenario. However, it is possible that at some level, from these two on their own, that particular office, or all the way up to the national level that a passive don’t ask policy has morphed into something more pro-active. It is just human nature to not want to deal with things like having someone arrested or deported, and just pretending they didn’t say something.
Jonathan
You know me, ever alert for the rampant hyocrisy of the left. We had a thread a while ago in which employees of Backwater were accused of having used prostitutes, even child prostitutes. Refresh your memory here.
And … what do you know? Although a few posters did hop on the Blackwater-is-evil-a-ha! bandwagon, most noted the flimsy evidence and drew distinctions between a few Blackwater employees and the organization itself.
I’m just sayin’, is all.
Actually, there are a number of people who think that flooding electoral offices with voter registration cards is a specific tactic used to insert uncertainty into election results and set the stage for protests and contests of close elections. By flooding an office with registrations (even fraudulent ones), ACORN can set up a situation where it’s impossible to check them all. Then after the election, they can protest about ‘voter disenfranchisement’ because X% of voter registrations weren’t processed in time.
From the Pottstown Mercury News:
Here’s a CNN Investigation Video on ACORN’s tactics. In this case, they turned in 5,000 voter registration cards right at the deadline before the election. HALF of them were fraudulent. The election official said it was disrupting their office and preventing them from doing their other work.
Also, ACORN will use the fact that only a small percentage of registered voters actually vote as an example of voter intimidation.
Another possible motivation: Swelling the ranks of registered Democrats affects poll results. When a pollster takes a poll, he records the affiliation of the respondent. After the poll is completed, the results are adjusted to match the registered voter ratio. Having a whole lot of extra registered Democrats means that such polls will always be skewed towards the Democratic position.
So this isn’t harmless. It undermines confidence in the electoral system, it overloads electoral workers which makes other errors more likely, and it may bias election polling. And of course, if there ARE fraudulent votes, the huge flood of registrations makes them harder to spot. And of course, ACORN lobbies like crazy to prevent voters from having to show ID.
And all of those potential sources of error work in favor of the people ACORN wants elected. What a coincidence.
The question I have is, if this is all completely harmless and has no effect on the eletion, why is ACORN so willing to pay for so many fraudulent registrations? They pay per registration, so this is cost them a lot of money. Yet they seem to be perfectly okay with it. Why is that?
Also, if ACORN’s sole interest was to make sure that legitimate voters are registered, why do they have this habit of turning all the registrations in right at the deadline? Why don’t they turn them in as they receive them, to maximize the electoral office’s chance of getting them all processed? In the first article I linked to, they said that some of the registrations had been collected as early as July, and were held until the last minute then turned in. If you take ACORN’s word that they are simply trying to help voters get registered, this seems like bizarre behavior.
What does election fraud have to do with this?
I agree with those who have said that it’s possible that ACORN has a culture of non-inquiry into illegal activities, which can then be taken too far. I, too, have been unable to watch the video as of yet.
The voter registration fraud discussions spanned many many threads and pages last year, and at the end of them, the righties were still making the same bogus claims as they had at the beginning. That they’re trotting them out again is disgusting but not surprising.
Yeah, that was worded very poorly. A better example would be from my mandatory annual ethics training - we were told of a case where a salesman bribed a customer to get a sale. The company did not direct him to do so, but the salesman was acting as an agent of the company, so the company was fined millions of dollars.
In another case, an employee violated company procedure and dumped some toxic chemicals in a ditch because he didn’t want to take them to the proper disposal facility. Again, the company itself was fined because the employee was acting as an agent for the company.
I see no difference between this an an ACORN employee in an ACORN office actively colluding to defraud the government and hide child prostitution. ACORN should be held responsible.
I’ve been watching the full Baltimore video, and this screams BS to me. Specifically, the pimp’s voice sounds edited and dubbed in, and the ACORN worker never seems like she’s reacting directly to what he’s saying.
The DC video, on the other hand, is pretty undeniable. Either it’s a total setup, or the ACORN reps are completely crazy. Very disturbing.
That’s some pretty vigorous backpedaling there, Sam. Shall we wait for you to catch your breath?
Because ACORN is the one turning in the bad employees to the authorities.
No, they shouldn’t. ACORN is the one discovering the wrong-doing and turning people in to the authorities (wrt fraudulent registrations).
And they’re glad to do it:
So this filmmaker went to six cities before he found an Acorn staffer willing to give him the damning evidence he was looking for.
One has to wonder… how long would he have kept doing it if nobody had ever given him the result he was looking for?
And should we use this example in the future? Let’s say someone decided to set up the RNC… and went around, trying to get them to accept bribes. You know that eventually, they’ll find someone who will accept the bribes. Can this then be used to impugn the RNC?
Do we really want to go here? 'Cause I can see this sort of thing getting really out of hand.
OK, look, I was messing about a bit because I thought most people would get what I was driving at, but clearly you didn’t. yorick’s cite proves nothing save the apparent willingness of the Washington Times to believe in conspiracy theories. The cited article provides no supporting evidence of supression of an ACORN investigation other than Conyers’ own claim that this was so. The article’s author apparently made no attempt to determine the veracity of Conyers’ claim, simply reported it as it was. In my experience, most legitimate news organizations would either not bother to center a story around such an unverifiable claim, or at least run it with the caveat that no supporting evidence could be found. This is, therefore, a perfect example of why the WT is generally thought of as an unreliable source of news.
Now, with that hijack over, lets see how any of this fits in with the subject of the OP. You, yorick, and a few others seem to be ready, willing and eager to believe that whatever this so-far very poorly reported story of support for prostitution may turn out to be, it shows that there is something fundamentally wrong with ACORN as an organization. Why do you believe this? Well, in part it would seem that you already believe equally badly reported rumor, and outright lies, about the organization. As several posters have pointed out, there appears to be no credible evidence whatever that ACORN, as an organization, ever perpetrated voter fraud. At best, as many have repeated over and over again, a few individuals working for ACORN falsified voter registration forms to meet quotas, and in nearly all cases were exposed by their own employer. Apparently no one registered by ACORN is known to have voted fraudulently. What, then, is the actual evidence of voter fraud?
I don’t have any particular axe to grind fer or agin ACORN; in fact, I never even heard of them prior to the most recent presidential election. All I’m saying is, I personally will need to hear a lot more about this story, particularly a plausible reason why the ACORN employees involved would willingly go along with discussing strategies for avoiding taxes on prostitution revenues, before I draw any conclusions about the organization as a whole. I would say precisely the same if this were an equally absurd monkeywrenching attempt on any other organization, even (gasp!) one that identified itself as right-wing.
So your purpose in starting this thread wasn’t really to get the board to discuss ACORN, but simply to stimulate a reaction. Interesting.
ACORN was formed by Barack Obama to be his personal army of indoctrinators, right? They’re the reason Obama is destroying America. Right? So I guess this means Obama likes child prostitution.
What will we call the next gang of misinformed people? Not deathers, but hookerers? Trickers? Ho-ers?