What an excellent thing it is, then, that I made no such insinuation.
No: what you’re missing is that ACORN is not the only, nor even the most important, victim of the fraud. While they were the ones who were directly defrauded, the real problem with the fraud is that it created extra work for public employees. And ACORN made that situation possible: without them, the extra work wouldn’t have occurred.
They didn’t use quota progarms.
ACORN did make this clear. The people pereptrating this fraud don’t care if it benefits anyone. They just want to get paid without doing the work.
This would be illegal. ACORN was not allowed to make determinations about what forms were illegal or illegal.
The major problem is that ACORN was not legally allowed to make determinations about the validity of the registration forms. They were legally required to pay the same for fake forms as for valid ones. All ACORN was allowed to do was flag them as suspicious when submitting them. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with the law, not with ACORN.
Just imagine the law did allow ACORN to make its own determinations about the validity of registration forms, though, and to discard the ones it concluded were faked. Do you think that would actually pacify the ACORN bashers or only have increased the howling?
Cite that there would be any legal responsibility?
What these day workers did was essentially the ame thing as falsifying a time card. The only victim was ACORN itself, and it’s ridiculous to say that ACORN is responsible for getting scammed, especially when they had very little legal choice about it.
Once again, ACORN was required, by law, to pay for bogus registration fornms. They had no option not to. Tell me how they could have gotten around that.
The fact that so few workers did this to them out of the thousands that were hired actually shows that ACORN did a fairly remarkable job of screening and training with the limited resources and legal abilities that it had.
Vote related fraud was not the only criterion for what constituted a covered group. You are cherry picking.
No, it’s NOT what I asked for. I asked for a cite that they had been charged with violating quota laws. Read my post in contxt.
This does not logically fly. By the very fact that ACORN was submitting thousands of REAL registrations, it created more work for public employees. The very few fraudulent registrations (that ACORN was legally required to submit) would not have changed this workload by a significant amount.
Perhaps we can agree that ACORN should have done a better job vetting their workers, and should not have hired those who would take advantage of ACORN and try to get paid for not doing the work that ACORN paid them to do.
Can we also then agree that the punishment for the “crime” of hiring some few dishonest workers should not be the complete destruction of the organization?
Jesus Christ. From one of my links:
Of course I agree with both of these statements. That’s what I’ve been saying all along.
This is either false or ridiculously pedantic. I am, of course, suggesting that the $5 bonus would go to an employee who flags another employee’s registration as suspicious, as long as a supervisor agrees with the flagging. The point of this bonus is to remove the incentive for making bogus registrations. Employees will by law get paid for the day’s work even if they do nothing: they just won’t get hired back the next day if they do nothing. This system would remove the incentive to do nothing but file false registrations in an attempt to look as if you did something.
This would have no efect on the incentive to fill out fake registrations, only on the incentive to flag those of others. Since ACORN was not allowed to determine that even the flagged forms were fake, they were not allowed to say that the workers didn’t do the work.
These are also people who don’t much care about being hired back the next day. They were looking for one easy score.
And just for the record, if someone did turn in what looked to be an obviously forged set of forms, they weren’t hired again. ACORN had to pay them for the day, but they did not hire them back again. They didn’t need other workers to flag bad forms for them or to figure out they were being scammed. What makes you think they were given any more work once ACORN figured out they weren’t doing the work? Cite?
You’re grasping at straws here. ACORN was already doing what you’re saying they should have been doing.
So you tell me. If the employees weren’t trying to get hired back a second day, and if they weren’t filling a quota system, why did they create fake registrations?
And cite Nazi, no cite for you until you quit denying that the cites I’ve given you are exactly what you asked for.
No, it isn’t:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/elections/article852295.ece
As that report indicates, ACORN flagged suspicious entries (like a group of them all in the same handwriting), but the rule has a point – it prevents disefranchising people whose names might sound like a joke – so people really named Humbert Humbert and Bob Hope get a right to vote. And for all, I know, there really are people named Mickey Mouse out there.
Jesus Christ, guys: I know that. Read what I said. I did not say that the cross-check should be done so that the fake registrations wouldn’t be turned in. I did not say that ACORN should make any sort of legal determination about whether a form was officially fraudulent. I simply said that, if there were better internal controls (giving an example control off the top of my head), they wouldn’t have had such problems with fraudulent registrations.
To get paid for the day. Duh.
I concede the one on the quota charges (which I didn’t read carefully enough), but there was no conviction, and that’s a separate issue anyway. The fact is that ACORN did not use a quota system, they just paid a flat fee for the day. People would scam them to get paid for a day’s work without doing a day’s work. What’s so mystifying about that?
And not for nothing, but you are the one making an allegation against ACORN so you are the one who needs to back it up. If it is your assertion that ACORN had a parctice of hiring back workers who they knew had previously scammed them, then cite it.
You can’t deny an hourly worker their wages, no matter how shitty a job they do, by federal law. Duh. All you can do is fire them. Duh.
What’s mystifying is that you post that even after I quoted you the bit about the quota system. Here it is again:
What’s mystifying is that you still say they didn’t use a quota system, and that you say getting paid an extra $5 for turning in 21 cards is a flat fee for the day.
Goddammit, no, that’s not my assertion, and if you’d read my posts more carefully than you read my cites, you’d realize it. My assertion is that ACORN was insufficiently careful about training workers and monitoring their work, and that they therefore got taken advantage of more than they needed to, and that the offenses against them bled over into offenses against public officials who had to clean up their mess. AFAICT, ACORN agreed with what I was saying, before they went out of business.
As has been explained, the only thing ACORN offices could do about it was not hire those people back again, which they didn’t. They still had to pay them for that particularly day, though, and that’s all the scammers were looking for.
That’s what they DID do. What is your point?
They didn’t use a quota system. You are misinformed. This was an accusation made against one office, and if such a system was used (which hasn’t been proven), it would have been done against institutional policy. ACORN did not use a quota system. You are wrong about this.
Cite?
Jesus, what a load of desperate, scrabbling horseshit. Training had fuck all to do with it. They got scammed by a very few because it’s impossible to screen 100% for scammers. They did not have the option of not paying people for the day’s work, but they did have the option of not hiring them again, which is what they did.
By the way, even a hypothetical quota system would not have increased incentives to scam any more than a flat fee for the day, and there wasn’t any “mess” to “clean up.” You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Fake registrations are simply discarded at the appropriate level. All registrations have to be verified regradless. This was a very few fake forms that created no extra work for anybody. ACORN actually made it a lot easier on them by flagging them.
And I will point out again that the only victim was ACORN itself.
Hasn’t been proven? LHoD’s cite says that ACORN officials admitted that it was done by that one office. What more proof do you need?
That it was done at an institutional level. One office violating policy is not an idictment against ACORN.
LHOD’s cite doesn’t say that ACORN officials admitted it, by the way. It quotes some prosecutor as saying they admitted it. Show me a conviction, or formal adjudication of guilt.
The story of ACORN is the stroy of an organization that was so successful that it grew too fast an didn’t create the intstitutional and internal controls that would have not created some of the controversey. It is not an evil organization, in fact it almost certainly did a lot of very good things, but it was not particularly tightly run. There can defineitly be criticism of ACORN. However, there is no denying that its failure was based on an ideologial witch hunt that demonized ACORN because they dared to try and help the inner city and other less advantaged neighborhoods.
At this point, I’m remembering why arguing with Dio is an exercise in futility. He misrepresents what people say, he refuses to read cites, he moves goalposts, and if an issue isn’t presented in a good vs. evil, black & white fashion, he can’t comprehend how it’s presented.
If anyone else wants to discuss this, I’m happy doing so.
Gangster I agree with your post entirely. I really regret ACORN’s demise: the good they did was far outweighed by the very trivial ills they inflicted. And the right-wing’s vicious campaign against ACORN is disgraceful: they might want to consider the beam in their own eye.
ACORN does not have the right to determine if a voters registration is fake or not. There is no way to check. There are 34 people in the country named Mickey Mouse. If they tossed valid aps, they would have gotten in real trouble.They have to pass them on ,where they are evaluated. The small, small amount of illegal voters indicates the system works very well.