Shodan, ACORN really is mandated by law to submit every registtration form that’s filled out, regardless of how suspicious, or even obviously falsfied thy may be. They have no legal choice about it. They are not allowed to make decisions as to what forms are or are not valid. They have to submit them all, and let the relevant state agencies sort them out. All that ACORN is allowed to do is flag the frms which they think are suspicious. Which they do.
These are facts, and they’re not debatable facts. You can’t handwave them away by calling them “bizarre.”
It’s not. Registrations are not votes. Voter fraud, by definition, has to include an attempt to cast an illegal vote.
ACORN has never been charged with voter fraud, and the organization has not even been charged with registration fraud.
Awright! Now we’re getting somewhere! Shodan’s got the proof that nobody else, anywhere, has! And as soon as he brings it, we will all line up to apologize most profusely! Me first!
And should he fail to do so, we can fairly be assured that he is, as we suspect, a lying sack of shit!
No they didn’t, the people who gave the forms to them forged some names, as did some temp workers (very few comparatively) who were trying to steal from ACORN. The oirganization forged nothing and, in fact, flagged the bogus registration forms themselves.
They didn’t commit any fraud whatsoever. They REPORTED fraud.
This is flatly and unambiguously false as a matter of hard objective fact.
Okay, so the sticking point seems to be how much culpability ACORN has for the actions of a few. Forging fraudulent registration forms does not appear to be a goal of the organization, nor is it apparent that the front-liners who turned in fraudulent registrations were given permission or ordered to do so.
The anti-ACORN side is happy to dump the mess in the organization’s lap entirely, usually with the argument that a business is responsible for the actions of its agents while on company time. I can’t say that’s an unreasonable stance, except when we get to the law about being required to turn in the forms.
I’m QC for a transcription company. My responsibility is to ensure the transcripts that our independent contractors type up are accurate to a certain degree and are properly formatted. If a contractor chooses to type up gibberish that has nothing to do with the audio provided, our company most certainly is responsible if we choose to send that on to our customer.
But if there were a law that said we had to send our transcripts to our customers as is, and we weren’t allowed to make any changes to what we received, then yes, a goodly portion of our finished products would be crap because of some workers that chose to cut corners.
Does the quality of the product remain our problem? We can fire the lazy contractors, but the damage has already been done. Is it fair to blame that damage on the company, provided they’re already doing as much preventative QC as they can?
ACORN did not forge any forms. A temp worker for ACORN did. ACORN flagged these forgeries. ACORN fired the temp worker. ACORN was **still required to submit these **(now flagged! Look at these! ) forms and these forms (forged by a temp worker) were subsequently tossed out BY OFFICIALS (not by ACORN) as part of the correct procedure.
It might also be relevant to note that half our business is law enforcement recordings, and our transcripts are often used in court proceedings. If this law were in place that said we had to turn in transcripts as is and couldn’t correct them before sending them to our customers, should we then be found guilty of fraud or perjury or whatever the proper penalty is? That law requiring the forms to be handed in is one hell of a hand-tier.
“More than one”? This is an organization that has, according to its own website, 400,000 member families in 1,200 chapters. And that doesn’t even include the thousands of people who it hires to do voter registration work. The fact that “more than one” of these people might have been convicted of voter registration fraud does not, in my opinion, conclusively point to the sort of structural and institutional problems that you seem to believe exist in the organization.
Rather than using its own internal investigation as evidence of wrongdoing at an institutional level, why don’t we wait and find out what the investigation reveals? If it reveals that some chapters or groups have been acting illegally, then deal with that. If it reveals that a few individuals have been committing fraud for personal gain, then deal with that. And if it reveals deep institutional corruption, then deal with that. But the fact that a few individuals have been convicted doesn’t really amount to very much.
I have access to Lexis/Nexis, and i did a search on terms like:
acorn voter fraud conviction
and some similar permutations and combinations, going back two years, and i found nothing about any convictions. I found one Philadelphia Inquirer article from October, 2008, about a Chester, PA, man who was a former ACORN worker who had been arrested for altering names and forging signatures on voter registration cards. But that was it.
It could be that my Lexis/Nexis search skills aren’t as good as i thought, but i’m generally pretty good at finding news stories on that database.
Well, you missed this one, which I did manage to find - via a wingbat website - given the “christopher edwards nevada” information contained in Shodan’s link above.
And I know there was a case here in St. Louis shortly before I got here. Try the Post-Dispatch.
:rolleyes: No, it is not like that at all. Stuffing a ballot box results in fake votes being counted. A registration form in the name of Mickey Mouse is harmless unless and until someone claiming to be Mickey Mouse tries to vote. (Falsely claiming to be Mickey Mouse, that is; apparently some people are named that for real. Take it up with Hugh Jass.) You obviously are trolling, because you cannot possibly be stupid enough to miss the difference.
Like fuck it is. Shodan and Sam being so comically worse does not make Bricker any less dishonest or amoral.
But, by comparison, the Counselor does at least recognize what a fact is, if only for the purpose of weaseling around it. If you think that means something of value, you can have it.
One of Facebook’s registered users created a poll over the weekend, asking whether or not President Obama should be killed. Facebook operators removed the poll and are cooperating with the Secret Service to root out the perpetrator(s) and are working on coming up with better procedures to monitor their user-generated content.
How much culpability should Facebook have for the actions of this individual?
Again, though, this isn’t voter fraud, or even voter registration fraud. This is a crime, to be sure: it’s in essence bribing people to register other people to vote. There’s a good reason for it to be illegal. But it’s not voter fraud any more than it’s shoplifting. It’s a different crime altogether.
Y’know, it’s not only laborious, but really disgusting to scour through these fucking whackjob sites trying to find links that are a) to a real news source, and b) live. If y’all want to pretend that there have never been any convictions of anyone connected to ACORN of crimes related to voter registration, then feel free. You’re not fooling anybody, though.
Wonder why the Right wingers aren’t up in arms, demanding the arrest and prosecution of Ron Nehring and Steve Poizner, who offered to pay $5.00 for every new registration turned in to them?
Oh yeah, because Ron Nehring is the California Republican Party Chairman and Steve Poizner is the Republican State Insurance Commissioner, and their offer was limited to newly registered Republicans.
Note: freep.com is the Detroit Free-Press, a reputable newspaper and home of writer Mitch Albom (he of Tuesdays With Morrie fame), among others. freerepublic.com is the whackjob site.