Acorn and Election Fraud

[tongodeon]

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

Comments

[erikred]

Note, in contrast, actual voter registration fraud:

Signature-gatherer arrested in voter fraud

[tongodeon]

It's totally possible to commit fraudulent voter registration for the purpose of altering an election's outcome. But that's not what Acorn is doing.

There *have* been a few cases where Acorn volunteers left registration applications in cars or boxes and didn't actually turn them in to be recorded. That's actually a far more serious type of voter registration fraud, but for some reason it's not the type that people seem most concerned about. They seem wound up about "Acorn is registering fake Democrats", not "Acorn is pretending to register real Republicans".

[erikred]

Right.

The particular irony lies in the fact that prior to recently lambasting them, McCain and the GOP have been big supporters of ACORN.

[cactusthesaint]

This neighbor is considerably less extreme than your previous one.

[opadit]

Yes, it's been infuriating to see people fail to distinguish between voter registration fraud and voter fraud, including former state supreme court justices (who's obviously doing it disingenuously).

[glaucon]

there's an economic incentive to pad the list with made-up voters.

I've seen this elsewhere and believed it to be the case for a while, but I've seen other sources which stated that the people registering voters were paid by the hour rather than by the registration, so there might not be as much of an incentive to pad than it seem(s/ed).

obviously, it's easier and less time consuming to make a list of 40 fake names while hanging out at the coffee shop or bar than it is to go bang on 40+ doors, but it doesn't incentivize fraud the way a commission per voter would.

also missing from your analysis is something else I've seen cited repeatedly which is that in many (most? all?) cases, state law says they *have to* turn in any registrations they receive - fake or not. to allow them (or others) to do otherwise invites scenarios where only people from your party get their registrations turned in and the others go in the trash.

[opadit]

state law says they *have to* turn in any registrations they receive

That's been my experience when I've done voter registrations over the years. Vetting the cards is the job of the election office, not the job of the card-gatherer. The deal has been that I can help people fill out the form (for example, explaining what "city," "municipality," and "county" mean on the Pennsylvania paperwork -- in Philadelphia, they're all the same), but I can't decide not to turn one in because it looks fishy to me. Invalid registrations are dealt with at the state or county level, or on election day when newly registered "Mickey Mouse" doesn't have ID to show at the poll.

[tongodeon]

Exactly. Acorn doesn't allow anything new - anyone can register Mickey Mouse and the same county official is going to have to certify the registration. Acorn *does* have a higher than average failure rate but they've ended up paying for the extra investigation out of pocket when the fuckup gets extreme, as they should if they did a bad job.