Saturday, October 18, 2008

Mickey Mouse: non-voter.

As someone who has worked as a canvasser in the past, I can guarantee that this claim that ACORN is attempting to "destroy the fabric of democracy itself" through false registrations is 100% pure bullshit.

Canvassing is a job which involves minimal supervision. Unlike working in an office or a store, employees (the canvassers) are on their own for nearly their entire shift. Groups like ACORN need to make sure that canvassers don't just register voters for 20 minutes then sit down and listen to music for a few hours, so they pay their workers on commission. Register x voters, earn y dollars.

Most of these workers are idealistic kids--usually college students, glad to have a chance to work in politics and earn a few dollars at the same time. Most of them wouldn't dream of filling out a fraudulent form.
There will, however, always be people who are a bit less scrupulous. It isn't very hard to fill out a couple extra registration forms to meet a quota, and earn a few more dollars.

Thankfully, the people who try to pull this stunt seem to be almost universally suffering from a chronic lack of creativity. Fake registrations are filled out for Mickey Mouse and Michael Jordan, and the canvassers responsible get fired.

Here's the thing, though--these registrations still need to get turned in. It would be illegal for ACORN (or anyone else collecting registrations) to throw out a completed form. We don't want to have Democratic groups throwing out Republican registration forms, and visa versa.

So ACORN turns in the phony registrations, alerts the registrar to possible fraud, and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck never show up to vote.

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