'luci, you owe me a new sarcasm meter. The needle on mine is now stuck a good 2 cm into the wall behind me.
I don’t believe that’s correct. ACORN is not allowed to determine for themselves which ones are legit for the purposes of choosing which ones to hand in. It is true that they have to hand in every registration they receive. But nothing is stopping them from auditing these forms for the purposes of internal quality control. In fact, ACORN claims that it already does this.
If you think ACORN is completely innocent and has good procedures and does its best, I’m not sure I understand why you would be so opposed to simply having a bipartisan commission investigate their practices and report on them. Perhaps we’d find that their error rate is well within norms. I don’t think so, but you guys seem to think so. Or, we’ll find out that they have faulty procedures but no criminal intent, in which case ACORN will merely be asked to clean up its act, and in the process will help clear its name.
As for what ACORN could do to stop people from handing in bogus registrations, I can think of a couple of really easy ones: How about withholding payment for workers until their registrations have been checked, and making payment conditional on there being no fraudulent applications?
Also, it’s true that ACORN does not generally pay per registration as a matter of policy, but several ACORN offices have been charged for doing exactly that in violation of the law. In any event, what ACORN does do is skirt around the law by paying by the hour - but only if a certain quota of registrations is met. This is a strong incentive to cheat for those who can’t get enough people to sign up legally. If you’ve worked your ass off all day to register people, then you find out at the end of the day that you’re 20 registrations short, what are you going to do? So ACORN could drop the quota requirement.
ACORN could also increase supervision of workers on the street, putting them in pairs and making each other responsible for the veracity of all registrations.
ACORN could also change the way they collect registrations. Rather than sending people out by the themselves to canvas the community, they could move to a different system, such as setting up mobile registration vehicles that park in a neighborhood like an ice-cream truck, with each one staffed with a supervisor responsible for ensuring registrations are valid.
Would all of these methods cost ACORN more money and increase their workload? Yep. That’s the way controllership works. The company has a responsibility to make sure its employees operate within the law, even if it costs the company money to do so. Every other corporation in America has to follow these guidelines, and I fail to see why ACORN should get a pass simply because it’s doing work you personally approve of.
I asked because I said this:
And you replied:
Which certainly seemed to me to suggest that you didn’t favor the idea.
If they do, then they can easily satisfy that requirement, can’t they?
They’ve only been unenthusiastic up to now because it’s a private organization, subject to the whims of liberals! Put it into the hands of the government of the Greatest Country in the History of the World and it will be a brilliant success. There will be a lot of joining of hands, which might look like homosexual hand-holding but is really just a clasp of friendship, and then everyone can spit on ACORN (or pee, depending on the exact location of any fluidical excesses) and odds are good someone would bust out some Kate Smith.
sniffle It’s my dream.
I"m sorry, my sarcasm meter is busted (see above).
Bricker, how is it that you can be so smart when you talk, and so dumb when I do? You can hone a semantic parsing of a point so finely it could be used to perform an appendectomy on a flea! Yet when I talk, the terms escape your understanding and elude your comprehension.
You know, if it weren’t for the big, brown innocent eyes batting furiously, I’d swear you weren’t entirely sincere.
Approximately 735 millihicks.
I don’t do sarcasm.
Are you people honestly trying to claim that those on the right would want to see any citizen, granted the honor of being a part of the US, denied his or her franchise? Kept from the opportunity to share in the reflected glories of Washington, Jefferson, and Millard Fillmore through casting a secret ballot and thereby changing the course of the world?
Next you’ll be suggesting they benefit by fewer people voting, and we all know that can’t be true.
You are wrong. ACORN is not allowed to investigate or validate registrations on their own. They’re not even allowed to call the phone numbers on the cards to see if they’re real people. All they can do is flag them as suspicious. Only the state can say a registration is valid, not ACORN.
I’m sure you’ve never had any involvement with any terrorist plots, so you should have no opposition at all to being thoroughly invetsigated and reported on.
What makes you think they don’t?
Denied? Oh, certainly not! But is there really some need to send people out to press registration on the lazy, the drug-addled and the unwilling?
Why can’t ACORN call the numbers, or look them up, to see if they’re real? Of course they still have to submit the form, but that would surely aid them in their task of delivering two boxes, one labeled “SUSPICIOUS BUT WE HAVE TO SUBMIT THEM ANYWAY” and one labeled “PRETTY SURE THESE ARE OK.”
I don’t express an opinion on the point, Diogenes. I said I am in favor of a requirement that any organization receiving funds for the purposes ACORN does be required to submit audits and samples of their internal control and hiring procedures and make continued funding contingent on those procedures meeting a minimum standard.
If ACORN does that already, then I am in favor of their continued receipt of funding.
So, clearly, and in words of one syllable: do you think my plan is a good one? Would you say yes to it?
Sir, I find your demand for one syllable words to be confining, restrictive, and counterproductively injurious! I refuse to be bound by such pygmifying verbification!
My caveat is that your proposal seems aimed squarely at ACORN, seeing as how they are just about the* only* organization that might recieve funds “for the purposes ACORN does”. You might as well name it the Bricker-Stone ACORN Regulation Bill, since ACORN is pretty much the only group it will apply to (by a careful reading of your terms.)
Since you don’t seem to be proposing a wide-ranging crusade to rid out governance of fraud and abuse, I have to assume you mean to suggest that there is a dreadful problem afoot, and swift action is to be taken. I don’t think either of those is true.
One learns to speak carefully to Jesuitical trained lawyers, one simply must’nt nod one’s head in offhanded compliance at what may appear to be a casual suggestion. That oddly placed bunch of leaves directly in the forest path, for instance, may not be as harmless as it appears.
Ha ha ha ha!!!
Can you imagine the complete shit-storm that would be produced if ACORN were calling up people on voter registration forms to “vet” them? And then dividing the forms into piles of suitable and non-suitable?
I can visualize the comments:
“How can you possibly think it’s OK for ACORN to call people up an harrass them? How do you think it’s a good idea for ACORN to have influence over which voters are allowed to have registrations confirmed?”
Glenn Beck would have a field day.
ACORN does not have the authority to make those decisions. Nor are they trained to do so. Besides how loud would you scream if they tossed out a few republican voters out?
In the last few years that has been a total of 14 voter fraud cases. None of which are connected to ACORN. This is a smoke and mirrors campaign.
Because the law won’t let them. Why that’s the law, I don’t know.
ETA, they might be able to look them up. That I don’t know. I just know they’re not allowed to call them.
It’s also just flat-out not their job. That’s the job of the Supervisor of Elections, or the County Clerk, depending on the state.
Off with their hands.
So what’s your specialty, Bricker, corporate law or personal injury? Or maybe a little of each depending on who’s hiring?