Violence and politicsFollow

I misread an article from MSNBC. I thought it said 10 million (on 25). It said 10%. I no longer give a crap about them because it was only 2 cents of my money.

We should defund Acorn is some jamoke makes a fake video regarding them but the majority of the GOP firmly believes that funding companies that condone kidnapping and gang rape is the right thing to do.

True story.

You did it wrong. You need to hack it up so it says I condone kidnapping and gang rape so you can make Zam.com strip me of all my posts.



Uh oh...

OMG IT WAS A SET-UP!!!

Like how they were being investigated, but how the organization has not been charged with any fraud? That kind of reading?

Sorry, when you said "all ACORN did was 'voter registration fraud'" I thought you meant "all ACORN did was 'voter registration fraud,'" and not "ACORN failed to have systems in place to prevent employee misconduct." You can see how I would make that error.

Or it could be that "so far ACORN itself has not been officially charged with any fraud. Aside from the heated charges and counter-charges, no evidence has yet surfaced to show that the ACORN employees who submitted fraudulent registration forms intended to pave the way for illegal voting. Rather, they were trying to get paid by ACORN for doing no work."

Sure ACORN was negligent, but I think maybe we should be criticizing things they've actually done rather than things some of us wished they would have done because it'd be politically convenient for some of us.

I'm not brushing it off or insisting they aren't at fault for not having a system to guarantee safe car production. I'm just not suggesting that they are conspiring to murder people who happened to buy one of their unsafe cars.

ACORN was negligent in managing their employees, who committed voter registration fraud to earn more pay. ACORN was not conspiring to defraud the election process. There's a difference. Criticize them for what they have done, not what you wanted them to have done.

To be even more clear, the authorities who investigated ACORN found no evidence of intent to commit voter fraud. If you have a problem with how the investigation was carried out, take it up with those people, but don't insist that their findings don't exist because they don't suit you.

Edited, Nov 11th 2010 10:46pm by Allegory

If voter registration was remotely like automobile safety testing, you'd almost have a point. Almost. Not really, though.

Ironically, the way they are closest to being the same is that both utilize multiple layers of checks by different people to catch any single layer not doing their job right. Be it the IIHS, NHTSA or ACORN supervisors flagging potentially fraudulent registration cards as they send them in to state offices which further verify them.

Then what was the motivation? A car manufacturer is motivated by profit. Thus, we can conclude that if they take steps to shortcut around safety, it's not because they want people to die fiery deaths in their cars. But a non-profit doesn't have the same motivation, right? So one must ask *why* you'd have policies in place which certainly appear designed to maximize the likelihood of fraudulent registrations. If ACORN (I believe the "Project Vote" sub group actually) has no specific vested interest in how many people they register, but merely exists via public grants and private donations to "get out the vote", then why place such requirements in the first place?

And if those pressures came down from their funding sources (whether public or private) then shouldn't we also wonder what that motivation is? If a bunch of people donate money to a non-profit involved with voter registration, but we place some kind of requirement on that money based on the number of registrations obtained, shouldn't one wonder what *our* motivation is to do this? It's not just about the organization or even *this* organization, but the very idea of pooling money into/through organizations like this in ways which seems designed to maximize voter registration fraud.

That's troubling, and ACORN is just a symptom.



Ok. But what is "ACORN" in this context? Is that a person? A group of people? Where do we draw the line? At what point do we decide that "ACORN" is culpable and not just a person working for ACORN? Where does the buck stop? Because in the case in Nevada, the organization was indicted for violating the law not just because members hired to register people committed fraud, but because the compensation method that ACORN used violated the law. Those indictments went against the director of the branch office and at least one other senior person there.

So "ACORN fired them and then argued that since they fired them, the problem was resolved and no other legal action was required. Isn't that a bit of a cop out? I'll ask again: Where does the buck stop? How senior does the person involved with violating the law have to be before we blame "ACORN" and not just the employee?



Are you playing games with "voter fraud" versus "voter registration fraud"? Because in Nevada the actual organization itself violated the registration laws of that state by compensating their workers based on numbers of registrations. While I'm sure an investigation controlled by Democrats magically found the organization as a whole not to have been intending to do so, and we can certainly disagree on how impartial that decision was, it's kinda hard to assess a motive for this *other* than to create voter registration fraud.


I'll point out again that there should be no reason at all for any get out the vote organization to set quotas for their employees. And as I've pointed out, this is actually illegal in some states (like Nevada). Yet, this appears to be a commonly used compensation methodology that was used by ACORN. Why? What possible reason other than to encourage registration fraud would you have for doing this?

The policy of tying compensation/advancement/employment to number of registrations gained. This was widespread within the entire organization (at least the parts that were involved with registrations).

How did you not know this was what I was talking about? I'm pretty sure I mentioned this directly at least a few times in the post you just replied to.



You're the only one talking about the process by which said fraudulent registrations were discovered Joph. You keep jumping up and down and repeating this as though it excuses the entire issue. It doesn't.



What?! What hasn't been made clear is that allegation you keep making that all of these fraudulent registrations were found and flagged by ACORN themselves. What has been made abundantly clear is that ACORN did in fact have policies in place which encouraged people to submit false registrations. Whether those were in the form of quotas you had to meet, bonuses dangled in front of people, or straight pay-per-registration schemes, it's a very common theme.




And how about in your eyes? No matter how they justified it, they were still creating a financial incentive for their employees to register more voters. Can we please agree that this *isn't* what a non-profit voter registration group should be doing? And can we also agree that this creates an incentive for people to falsify voter registrations?

That was the argument I was making. I happen to think that if you create financial incentives for people to register more voters, you're going to get a bunch of fraudulent registrations. Thus, organizations shouldn't be doing that. Unless, of course, their intention is to get a bunch of fraudulent registrations.

I'll ask the question I asked in my earlier post again: Why do this? What possible honest reason could a non-profit voter registration organization have to tie financial incentives to quantities of voters registered? Do any of them outweigh the absolutely certain result of increased bogus registrations? I just don't think so. The only honest reason I can think of is if they don't trust their employees to actually do any work at all (folks take the money and then don't do any canvassing for registrations at all). Um... But if that's the issue, then how does creating a financial incentive help? I think you'd have to be a moron not to noodle out what's going to happen.




This is non-profit work though Joph. I already covered this. If there were a profit motive involved, I could see it. But with no profit motive, then capitalism isn't involved, right? Some other motive is. What could it be? Why waste funds creating incentives to register more voters? The folks running the non-profit shouldn't care how many people are registered. It should not matter at all, in fact. Why then create incentives to get people to increase registrations? Why create quotas? Why tie advancement to this?


It's not about getting people to "work hard" Joph. The fruits of that labor aren't themselves monetary in nature. There are far more effective methods to ensure that workers are doing the jobs they're employed to do. Supervision would be a good start. There are many others.

If I asked you to come up with a way to maximize the number of fraudulent registrations generated, aside from committing the fraud yourself (and I assume *you* don't want to go to jail), can you think of a better way to do it than creating exactly the kinds of incentive programs that ACORN used? At what point do you abandon the whole "it just happened and they didn't intend it at all!"?

lolwut??

It's not "non-profit" to the people who were paid to collect voter registrations, you dolt. It was a job for them. Do you think non-profits operate on a strictly volunteer basis or something? Because this is what your argument seems to revolve around when you keep saying "There's no financial motive!" and "It's non-profit!"

ACORN hired people to do a job. For money. ACORN tied the continued employment of those people to meeting performance standards. Especially since they couldn't pay people per registration, setting standards seems like a reasonable way to not pay someone to sleep for eight hours. ACORN offered bonuses to people who exceeded those standards? Why? Because they wanted people working hard. Why does ACORN want people working hard? Because they want people registered. Real people who will go out and vote as opposed to a bunch of cards filled out for Mickey Mouse which will never translate to real votes. Promoting fraudulent registration would go against the entire reason they're trying to get people registered. If they wanted a bunch of fake cards filled out, they don't even need to pay anyone $9 an hour, they can just crank some out at their kitchen table while watching Dancing With the Stars.

Again, it's funny that you decry ACORN offering bonuses to people for what they hope will be hard work and say it must be a giant conspiracy. But then you see conspiracies in everything these days so it's not especially surprising. You should totally find the tie between ACORN and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Obama's birth certificate and anthropogenic climate change and Olbermann's NBC contract. There's probably a vast Illuminati conspiracy here just waiting for you to crack it!

Edited, Nov 15th 2010 9:49pm by Jophiel