Jeff Fink <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: While Obama promises to redistribute the wealth, isn't it great that we have > a fine organization like Acorn to redistribute the votes.
Let us keep this discussion factual. What ACORN did cannot affect a single vote, or result in any false registrations. Federal law mandates computerized cross-checking of registrations that will easily catch the fake applications. I know a good deal about this because I did similar DP applications at NCR; I have been working with the Georgia registrar's office; I have worked at polling places during elections; and I have been translating Federal and state election laws into Japanese for U.S. citizens who are native speakers of Japanese. Here is what happened with ACORN: They paid unemployed and homeless people $8 per hour to collect registration forms. That's a dumb thing to do. Some of these people turned in hundreds of fake forms, which they filled in themselves with bogus information. They did this to collect the money without doing any work. It is was obvious that the info. was bogus, and the computerized cross checking will easily reveal it. They catch problems such as: the SSN and/or driver's license numbers not correlated; non-existent addresses; the signatures on several forms being the same; no record of the people existing; too many people at one address, and so on. These checks are thorough. This kind of checking has been done for decades. The cross-checking also reveals duplicate applications which are made for legitimate reasons, such as people who think the first application was lost in the mail, or people who realized they filled it out wrong, or people who did not get a registration card in the mail and think they have been deleted from the file (which sometimes happens). There is no penalty or problem with duplicates. The people at ACORN immediately realized that the applications were bogus, but once you recieve an application from a field worker, Federal law mandates that you hand it over to the election registrar. You cannot throw it away or mark it in any way. The people at ACORN attached notes to these applications telling the registrar that the applications were probably fake. That is all they are allowed to do. There is virtually no chance that these applications made it into the system, and even if a few of them did, real people with the names, SSN and other IDs listed would have to show up at the polls for there to be vote fraud. The chances of this happening are small. It would take a lot of effort and money to fabricate the fake IDs, and if the people are caught they would be in big trouble. They probably would be caught, because poll workers check IDs carefully and keep signatures of all voters, and they would notice if the same person came in twice, so you would have to register at many different locations. Georgia has a real-time computer network to check off people as soon as they vote. I heard that some woman in CA tried to register her dog to show how lax the registration procedures are. She found out they are not a bit lax, and she is now in big trouble. It is utterly absurd for McCain or any other politician to cite ACORN as a threat to democracy. The procedures used at the registrars and polling places easily catch this kind of problem. During an election, at any polling place, similar problems come up several times during the day, for legitimate reasons -- not criminal. They are dealt with swiftly. If the poll workers have a problem they cannot deal with, they use a real-time computer connections or they call a staff member at the registrars office, which is open and fully staffed for that purpose. At last resort they file a provisional ballot and deal with the problem after the election. (Provisional ballots must be provided in the case of a dispute.) - Jed
