Acorn and Election Fraud
On Sunday my neighbor asked me what the deal was with Acorn. The short version is that it's a community organization that advocates for various social issues. They're explicitly nonpartisan though their focus on affordable housing, education, predatory lending, disaster relief, voter participation, and gun control ( sigh) tends to bring them in closer alignment with Democrats.
One of Acorn's activities is registering voters. And one of the ways that they do this is by paying poor or homeless people to go door to door to find people. And obviously this is a problem - there's an economic incentive to pad the list with made-up voters. In San Diego it was 17% as opposed to 5% which is more typical in other organizations.
Both Acorn and the voting boards know about this problem. The same system that catches felons who try to register on their own catches felons who try to register through Acorn, in addition to Acorn's own internal auditing system. Acorn cooperates with auditors for the same reason that banks cooperate with the police; when a bank employee fabricates false transactions they are defrauding their employer, and when Acorn employees fabricate false voters they are defrauding the company that paid them to find real voters. Acorn works to obtain convictions of their criminal employees the same way that banks work to obtain convictions of their criminal employees.
According to prosecutors, the fictitious names are "an easy way to get paid, not as an attempt to influence the outcome of elections". And that's the main difference between Acorn's fraud and other forms of voting fraud. That's because when a rogue Acorn canvasser submits "Mickey Mouse" as a voter in King County, Mickey Mouse does not actually show up on election day. It's a big problem, but it's not the kind of problem that lets anyone steal elections.
Compare and contrast with phone bank jamming. With electronic vote switching. Misleading flyers. Caging undeliverable voters. Voter suppression. Intimidation. "Granny farming." Those election fraud measures do influence the outcome of elections, and they're what we should be concerned about in the last few weeks of the election.
One of Acorn's activities is registering voters. And one of the ways that they do this is by paying poor or homeless people to go door to door to find people. And obviously this is a problem - there's an economic incentive to pad the list with made-up voters. In San Diego it was 17% as opposed to 5% which is more typical in other organizations.
Both Acorn and the voting boards know about this problem. The same system that catches felons who try to register on their own catches felons who try to register through Acorn, in addition to Acorn's own internal auditing system. Acorn cooperates with auditors for the same reason that banks cooperate with the police; when a bank employee fabricates false transactions they are defrauding their employer, and when Acorn employees fabricate false voters they are defrauding the company that paid them to find real voters. Acorn works to obtain convictions of their criminal employees the same way that banks work to obtain convictions of their criminal employees.
According to prosecutors, the fictitious names are "an easy way to get paid, not as an attempt to influence the outcome of elections". And that's the main difference between Acorn's fraud and other forms of voting fraud. That's because when a rogue Acorn canvasser submits "Mickey Mouse" as a voter in King County, Mickey Mouse does not actually show up on election day. It's a big problem, but it's not the kind of problem that lets anyone steal elections.
Compare and contrast with phone bank jamming. With electronic vote switching. Misleading flyers. Caging undeliverable voters. Voter suppression. Intimidation. "Granny farming." Those election fraud measures do influence the outcome of elections, and they're what we should be concerned about in the last few weeks of the election.