For a change, I've decided to go ahead and write about a general topic rather than a specific news story. I have a few in mind to go after, but I think tonight I'll start things off with ACORN. I commented earlier about my belief that the right-wing was gearing up to make ACORN the modern-day "JFK stole the election" whisper story. While Dick Morris may not be the center of it, it sure is there. I found a blogger tonight commenting about the ridiculously close special election in NY-20 to replace Kirsten Gillibrand who replaced Hillary Clinton who replaced Condi Rice (the race right now is at 65 votes in favor of the Democrat with upwards of 10k absentee ballots uncounted). His worry was that ACORN was in the mix here, "ginning up" the "number of votes" (I paraphrased as 'voter numbers', but let's keep him at his word), and "infecting" absentee ballots. Also, he was worried that this was the way elections would work from now on.
The ACORN "scandal", of course, isn't really all that scandalous. I managed to get quite a few responses from this individual about the finer points of his argument, so why don't we go ahead and lay out the whole mess.
ACORN is an organization that essentially hires people to go door-to-door registering people to vote. They set a quota for number of registrations so that they know their employees are actually doing their job rather than hitting up their local church and calling it a day. By law, ACORN is required to submit all registrations they get back from the people they hire including suspicious ones. ACORN adds a cover letter noting suspicion to each registration they think might be bogus. It's up to the State at that point to make their voter lists accordingly. What happened was that lots of registrations came back with folks like Mickey Mouse, and Jimmy John. By lots, I mean a hell of a lot. I'm going to go by the blogger I conversed with's numbers to give the benefit of the doubt.
- Four ACORN employees indicted in Kansas City
- Eight in St. Louis (the blogger says "federal election fraud" were the charges)
- One man was registered 72 times in Cleveland (apparently bribed to do so)
- 2,100 phony registrations in Lake County, Indiana
- 49 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- 57,435 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Let's start with the indictments. ACORN turned in the people that got indicted in Kansas City (near the bottom of the article), and went on record saying they were happy about the indictments. Same goes for St. Louis (near the bottom of the article) . I would like to go ahead and believe that this blogger (I really don't want to give his name out, that just doesn't seem fair) read the whole of both of these articles, but it seems doubtful as he does not really seem to want to give ACORN any room in the outing of these people. If you read the St. Louis article, keep the second-to-last paragraph in mind for later. The guys that were indicted in KC for "federal election" fraud, by the way, were actually indicted for "voter registration" fraud. Those are very different, and brings us to that second list with all the big numbers on it.
One man registering 72 times sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? Guess how many times that guy gets to vote? Just once. I registered twice myself in '08 because I wasn't sure that I had stuck the right zip code on my first registration (I had recently moved across town), but only got one vote. This, of course, is the problem with the argument that ACORN participated in fraud at the election level. Register Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Jimmy John, G.I. Joe, John Doe, whoever. Unless the most surreal voting line ever materializes on election day, none of those registrations are going to lead to a fraudulent vote. Registration just means the name is being submitted to be on that list you have to check in on when you show up at your polling place. The reply? "There is a difference between submitting all registrations and willfully gathering fraudulent ones. If you every chose to look beyond the MSM and Dem sites for news, you might learn."
The allegation is now that ACORN was intentionally registering the likes of our favorite Disney characters in order to steal elections. Moreover, if I just stop looking at the mainstream media, and Democratic leaning websites (limiting me, of course, exclusively to Republican leaning websites as FOX counts as MSM according to Palin), then I'll learn. Now, to his credit, he doesn't say that what I learn will be truthful, but it really is like telling someone in a creationism debate to stop reading science and just go to church in order to learn. The difference between submitting all registrations and willfully gathering fraudulent ones is that in one case the person is very very bad at subverting an election. As noted in our surreal voting line above, there's really only one way for fraudulent registrations to become fradulent votes (and, honestly, if those folks actually showed up to vote.... wouldn't that just make it all legitimate?)
We move on, though, as I really just want to hear everything this guy has to say. I point out that there are hardly any actual cases of fraudulent voting (in all fairness, I remembered the figures incorrectly in our conversation. It turns out to be 2-3 per election cycle when I had suggested it was more like 1). His reply was that "for me, in the ase of ACORN, to be caught a few times indicates that many more fraudulent votes happen that are not caught. And more than that, fraudulent voter registrations is just how they roll. That is there plan." Let's take that second half first. The allegation now is that ACORN is simply an organization dedicated to the fraudulent registration of ficticious or deceased people for sinister purposes either unknown or unachievable by those means. The only thing so evil and stupid at the same time is probably one of these two guys.
The first half, now. To be caught a few times indicates that there is more that has not been caught. That may seem somewhat reasonable, though getting from there to the numbers from 2-3 per cycle up to anything significant enough to actually steal an election may not. There were roughly 120 million votes for President in 2008, with Obama winning almost 8 million more than McCain (about a six percent difference). We're talking about taking two or three fraudulent votes from those 120 million, and extrapolating without any further evidence that far more votes were fraudulent with a ceiling of eight million and one votes. What I said to him was a bit off on numbers since I had miscalculated the number of actual fraudulent votes, but here it is corrected:
I am a scientist working in a laboratory on some project. I have 120,000,000 samples to work with on this project, but find four of them have been contaminated. I therefore conclude that 59,668 of the samples (the sum of all suspicious registrations as well as indicted people listed above) are contaminated without a scrap more evidence to prove it. Moreover, I conclude that this 4.9% contamination proves a 51% contamination has either happened before or will happen from now on. I submit my results for peer review, and never work in my field again. It's like saying that we have shown that 5% of the Holocaust Denier's story is in fact true. There were Nazis. There were Jews. There was such a thing as Poland, and Warsaw, and Fascism. Done, and done. No Holocaust. There's just too much here going for them you just have to wonder, you know? What else is going for them? Just because we haven't discovered any reason to believe them, and have discovered lots of reasons not to, doesn't mean they're wrong; in fact, it probably means they're right. Just stop reading history books, and watching Spielberg movies, and check out some Holocaust Denier websites. You might learn something.
Honestly, I don't know why this argument has so much steam left in it. The horrific photoshop job above really does sum up the entire reason that ACORN didn't do squat to the election. Some folks wanted to knock off of work early, and still get paid their hourly wage. They mocked up a bunch of fake registrations, and turned them in. ACORN saw what they did, notified all the right people, fired the people responsible, and put a cover letter on each suspicious registration. What more were they supposed to do? Oh, wait. I have one more quote from him. "ACORN is basically a criminal enterprise that attempts to swing elections by registering voters multiple times, bus in voters or whatever is necessary to elect Dems."
They are basically criminal. Who cares that they are basically not. The argument is way too complicated to spend any time looking into in those phony baloney places like the news and liberal websites. No, thank you, I'll stick to my enclave of people who agree with me, and am quite content to tell others that they are the ignorant cave-dwellers who need to get out more. Also, you can attempt to swing an election by registering voters. Again, unless you're Fred Phelps or Leatherface, you don't have an excuse to seriously engage in something that unproductive to your ends.
Finally, bussing in voters "or whatever" is necessary to elect Dems. This implies that ACORN goes to places Democrats live, and bring them to places Republicans live in order to win Republican districts. If that were the case, then it would be necessary to win a Republican district to win the election. If that were true, then we would not really have any independent voters, just Republican moderates, and roughly 51% of the country would actually be red voters if you asked them. Again, minus Dick Morris, the claim that the 2008 electorate is essentially the same as the 2004. If I might quote myself: "the argument will be that somewhere on the order of G.W.Bush's 2004 numbers are still Republicans." Of course, bussing in voters actually means picking them up and bringing them to their respective polling places which does in fact increase the parity between likely voters and actual voters (distinct from registered voters). The downside to that? You'd have to ask a Republican, but I'd imagine the notion of spending your hard-earned [insert noun here] to help another human being vote is somehow alien to them; thus, most likely criminal.
A quick summation, and then I think we're done. ACORN pays folks to register other folks to vote. ACORN also polices those registrations, and takes legal action against their own employees when fraud is discovered; however, they abide by the law in submitting fraudulent registrations with flagging cover sheets on them. Multiple-registrants are, in fact, individual human beings rather than nebulous multi-bodied entities; thus, only vote once unless intentionally voting fraudulently. This occurs two to three times per election cycle. The reply from the other side of the isle is that, despite this, ACORN is basically a criminal organization that is criminalizing our country with all that crime they're criming all over the place because they are criminals.
Then they wonder why they aren't taken seriously.
One man registering 72 times sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? Guess how many times that guy gets to vote? Just once. I registered twice myself in '08 because I wasn't sure that I had stuck the right zip code on my first registration (I had recently moved across town), but only got one vote. This, of course, is the problem with the argument that ACORN participated in fraud at the election level. Register Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Jimmy John, G.I. Joe, John Doe, whoever. Unless the most surreal voting line ever materializes on election day, none of those registrations are going to lead to a fraudulent vote. Registration just means the name is being submitted to be on that list you have to check in on when you show up at your polling place. The reply? "There is a difference between submitting all registrations and willfully gathering fraudulent ones. If you every chose to look beyond the MSM and Dem sites for news, you might learn."
The allegation is now that ACORN was intentionally registering the likes of our favorite Disney characters in order to steal elections. Moreover, if I just stop looking at the mainstream media, and Democratic leaning websites (limiting me, of course, exclusively to Republican leaning websites as FOX counts as MSM according to Palin), then I'll learn. Now, to his credit, he doesn't say that what I learn will be truthful, but it really is like telling someone in a creationism debate to stop reading science and just go to church in order to learn. The difference between submitting all registrations and willfully gathering fraudulent ones is that in one case the person is very very bad at subverting an election. As noted in our surreal voting line above, there's really only one way for fraudulent registrations to become fradulent votes (and, honestly, if those folks actually showed up to vote.... wouldn't that just make it all legitimate?)
We move on, though, as I really just want to hear everything this guy has to say. I point out that there are hardly any actual cases of fraudulent voting (in all fairness, I remembered the figures incorrectly in our conversation. It turns out to be 2-3 per election cycle when I had suggested it was more like 1). His reply was that "for me, in the ase of ACORN, to be caught a few times indicates that many more fraudulent votes happen that are not caught. And more than that, fraudulent voter registrations is just how they roll. That is there plan." Let's take that second half first. The allegation now is that ACORN is simply an organization dedicated to the fraudulent registration of ficticious or deceased people for sinister purposes either unknown or unachievable by those means. The only thing so evil and stupid at the same time is probably one of these two guys.
The first half, now. To be caught a few times indicates that there is more that has not been caught. That may seem somewhat reasonable, though getting from there to the numbers from 2-3 per cycle up to anything significant enough to actually steal an election may not. There were roughly 120 million votes for President in 2008, with Obama winning almost 8 million more than McCain (about a six percent difference). We're talking about taking two or three fraudulent votes from those 120 million, and extrapolating without any further evidence that far more votes were fraudulent with a ceiling of eight million and one votes. What I said to him was a bit off on numbers since I had miscalculated the number of actual fraudulent votes, but here it is corrected:
I am a scientist working in a laboratory on some project. I have 120,000,000 samples to work with on this project, but find four of them have been contaminated. I therefore conclude that 59,668 of the samples (the sum of all suspicious registrations as well as indicted people listed above) are contaminated without a scrap more evidence to prove it. Moreover, I conclude that this 4.9% contamination proves a 51% contamination has either happened before or will happen from now on. I submit my results for peer review, and never work in my field again. It's like saying that we have shown that 5% of the Holocaust Denier's story is in fact true. There were Nazis. There were Jews. There was such a thing as Poland, and Warsaw, and Fascism. Done, and done. No Holocaust. There's just too much here going for them you just have to wonder, you know? What else is going for them? Just because we haven't discovered any reason to believe them, and have discovered lots of reasons not to, doesn't mean they're wrong; in fact, it probably means they're right. Just stop reading history books, and watching Spielberg movies, and check out some Holocaust Denier websites. You might learn something.
Honestly, I don't know why this argument has so much steam left in it. The horrific photoshop job above really does sum up the entire reason that ACORN didn't do squat to the election. Some folks wanted to knock off of work early, and still get paid their hourly wage. They mocked up a bunch of fake registrations, and turned them in. ACORN saw what they did, notified all the right people, fired the people responsible, and put a cover letter on each suspicious registration. What more were they supposed to do? Oh, wait. I have one more quote from him. "ACORN is basically a criminal enterprise that attempts to swing elections by registering voters multiple times, bus in voters or whatever is necessary to elect Dems."
They are basically criminal. Who cares that they are basically not. The argument is way too complicated to spend any time looking into in those phony baloney places like the news and liberal websites. No, thank you, I'll stick to my enclave of people who agree with me, and am quite content to tell others that they are the ignorant cave-dwellers who need to get out more. Also, you can attempt to swing an election by registering voters. Again, unless you're Fred Phelps or Leatherface, you don't have an excuse to seriously engage in something that unproductive to your ends.
Finally, bussing in voters "or whatever" is necessary to elect Dems. This implies that ACORN goes to places Democrats live, and bring them to places Republicans live in order to win Republican districts. If that were the case, then it would be necessary to win a Republican district to win the election. If that were true, then we would not really have any independent voters, just Republican moderates, and roughly 51% of the country would actually be red voters if you asked them. Again, minus Dick Morris, the claim that the 2008 electorate is essentially the same as the 2004. If I might quote myself: "the argument will be that somewhere on the order of G.W.Bush's 2004 numbers are still Republicans." Of course, bussing in voters actually means picking them up and bringing them to their respective polling places which does in fact increase the parity between likely voters and actual voters (distinct from registered voters). The downside to that? You'd have to ask a Republican, but I'd imagine the notion of spending your hard-earned [insert noun here] to help another human being vote is somehow alien to them; thus, most likely criminal.
A quick summation, and then I think we're done. ACORN pays folks to register other folks to vote. ACORN also polices those registrations, and takes legal action against their own employees when fraud is discovered; however, they abide by the law in submitting fraudulent registrations with flagging cover sheets on them. Multiple-registrants are, in fact, individual human beings rather than nebulous multi-bodied entities; thus, only vote once unless intentionally voting fraudulently. This occurs two to three times per election cycle. The reply from the other side of the isle is that, despite this, ACORN is basically a criminal organization that is criminalizing our country with all that crime they're criming all over the place because they are criminals.
Then they wonder why they aren't taken seriously.
