Violence and politicsFollow

Happen to know when the last time your were defautled or sub-defaulted was?

Nah. I've been defaulted before but usually when an entire thread is getting bombed from multiple sources. Knocking down a single post is easy, it's my base karma that's forever rock solid.

Whatever government funding they received to operate voter registration drives was absolutely *not* tied to numbers of registrations though. That's the point I keep making and you guys keep ignoring. We don't pay people based on how many voters they register. The very idea of doing it that way is flawed to the core.



There should *never* have been a requirement to "get enough people to register". That's the problem. Your friend was a victim of requirements ACORN set up themselves. Requirements we can only assume were set up deliberately to drive the "honest" people out, and maximize the number of people who would cheat by making up registrations.

It's a pretty clear cause and effect, isn't it?



Yes. And it also wasn't your job to make sure X number of people registered, was it? And while I'm sure you helped people to fill out the forms as correctly as possible, it's not a failure on your part if they still manage to misspell their own name, or put down the wrong street address. You can point to a line and tell them what goes there, but at some point it is the responsibility of the potential voter to register themselves to vote, right?


What you are doing as a volunteer (or an ACORN worker) is making registration available. Period. It's not supposed to be a numbers game. What ACORN did wrong was make it about the numbers. That's why everyone was so up in arms about them.

So you think it's wrong to set performance standards for your employees. Interesting.

Mainly interesting because you don't actually believe that. But you won't let that stop you from yapping like a good little puppy.

Now if we were talking about the private sector, he'd have no problem with people getting paid commissions.

If the thing they're getting paid commissions on is directly connected to the revenue gained by the employer, of course not!

Here's the problem though, as a non-profit engaged in registration activities, there should be *no* profit motive that is based on the number of people registered. I've stated this several times now, and no one has disagreed with this premise. Which leaves us with one of two possibilities:

1. ACORNs own revenue *is* tied in some way to the number of people they register. This would be troubling all by itself though, since the concept of doing it that way is generally considered "wrong". It at least pushes the point of blame a step past ACORN and to those who are making registration numbers a condition of ACORN funding.

2. ACORNs revenue is *not* tied in any way to the number of people they register. In this case, then we have to ask: Why do they do this? Is that perhaps a misuse of the funds they've been entrusted with? Is this also an indication of some dishonesty?


Assuming we accept the premise that it's a bad idea to tie a profit motive to voter registration, then either possibility is problematic. The same question (Why?) comes to mind. The only difference is where the choice to create such a situation is being made. And regardless of which is true, we can certainly point out that the predictable result (fraudulent registrations in huge numbers) would seem to be the only objective one could have for doing it this way.


I mean, there's a point at which insisting that you just didn't realize that paying people based on how many people they register would result in fraudulent registration has to ring false. I'm just amazed at how willing some people are to just look the other way.

So then, if, say, a charity for disaster relief overseas runs an operation whereby people may call in to donate funds, and this charity chooses to pay its workers based on the number of calls they field, we should be immediately suspicious of this process because the charity does not make any revenue and thus has no profit motive?

Joph the only motive that exists is profit. Why would acorn care about voter registration if they weren't making a profit.... duh

That's not really missing though. What defines "success" for a non-profit? I can only think of two things:

1. The ability to achieve whatever the non-profit was created to do.

2. The ability to gain funds from people who donate to the non-profit.


Both of those are interconnected, obviously. If you create a non-profit organization dedicated to feeding hungry people, one can certainly argue that by feeding more people you're going to both achieve the objectives of the non-profit *and* likely increase funding from those who like what you are doing.


To follow the analogy though, it would be counterproductive to try to measure "success" by counting the total number of pounds of food your organization gave away because it doesn't tell us if those who got the food were those who needed it most. And if you paid your workers based on the number of people they provided food for and then didn't supervise them to make sure they weren't just handing the food out to their own friends and family, it's kinda obvious what will happen next. Why take the time to identify people who are truly in need when your one metric for success is based just on handing out food?

Duh!



Their goal should be to make registration as available as possible. My whole point is that the second you just start bean counting the number of registration forms that are filled out you corrupt the process and ensure a large number of fraudulent registrations. Which brings us back to the two determinants of "success". This means that either ACORN itself has the goal of generating lots of fraudulent registrations *or* it means that those funding ACORN do (or some combination of those two). Those are both bad things. Clearly public money should not be involved in that, since that's *not* an outcome that the taxpayers should be paying for.

And if private funding includes that as the goal (or a condition for funding), then one must question the true goals of those who provide that funding.



I'll ask again: What are those goals? Do you see how when you keep saying this, it leads me to suspect that their goals aren't about helping people register to vote, but rather about putting a whole bunch of bogus registrations into the system? What is the "goal" here? Because based on the methodology they were using, it certainly appears like that goal was to generate a whole ton of fraudulent voter registrations. That's certainly what they accomplished anyway.




But if ACORN itself doesn't have any reason to care about how many people they register, then why push that requirement on their workers? That was the point here. If they have no financial/funding reason to do this, then why base compensation for their workers on it? And if they do, then what are the goals of those who placed that condition on the funding? Either way, it leads us to suspect that the goal was to generate a lot of fraudulent registrations.

That's certainly what happened, right? And it's not like that result wasn't obvious from the start. If you know that the methods you are planning to use will result in a negative, but you implement them anyway, then isn't it reasonable to assume that you wanted those negatives to happen? Why else do it?



Yes. And when "working harder" generates something for the employer you can make an argument about a balance between the risk of negative effects and the reward of increased profits being weighed in that decision. But when there's no "reward", we would assume there would be no reason to take that risk, right? Which leads one to assume that there is a reward. What is the reward? For a profit-based company, the reward is greater profits. For ACORN, what was it?


I think that the "reward" was increased fraudulent registrations. I still find it funny how whenever we have threads about voter fraud, and conservatives argue for things like voterID, and want to look closely at areas in which ballot box stuff could be occurring, the liberals always counter by saying that you can't stuff a ballot box if you don't have a list of registered voters to stuff the box with. And yet, when faced with an organizations like ACORN literally churning out massive numbers of bogus registrations, they don't bat an eye. The response always seems to be: "Registration fraud doesn't matter because those are just bogus people who aren't going to vote".

Um... Anyone see a hole in that logic? A combination of factors conspire to create the very conditions needed to enact election fraud, potentially on a large scale. And I'm sorry, but I've seen enough of the liberal "Ends justify the means" approach to politics to be willing to assume that this was all just an honest mistake.