Gathering Signatures
Unless you are totally off the grid [which you can’t be or you wouldn’t be able to read this] you have heard of the ACORN kerfuffle*. A lot of voter registration forms have been turned in that are self-evidently bogus, and this is a crime.
Now, it doesn’t matter what state you are in, or what your election laws say for this to be a crime. The election laws may make it multiple crimes, but there is always the basic crime involved – fraud. Not election fraud, which is dependent on local law, but common, everyday fraud, and the victim is ACORN.
We have a lot of initiatives in Florida which has led to having a lot of companies that specialize in gathering signatures. California suffers from the same disease, but every attempt to stamp it out fails because certain people know the only way of making their hare-brained schemes law is by ballot initiative. They also know that they can’t get enough volunteers to gather the required signatures within the average human lifespan, so they need paid gatherers.
The people who actually gather signatures are paid by the number of signatures they gather. This is similar to paying firemen by the number of fires they put out – you are giving crime, fraud or arson, a profit incentive.
It is obvious that signature gatherers have ripped ACORN off by turning in fraudulent voter registration cards and taking money for them. ACORN pays the gatherers and turns the cards into the elections office. Unless you can show that ACORN is paid based on the number of cards, rather than a management fee plus expenses, which is the normal procedure, ACORN is always a victim. It should also be noted that even if ACORN suspects that the cards are bogus, most states require that the cards be turned in as discarding them is illegal. Only the election officials can rule on the validity of the cards.
Blaming the victim is hardly a new phenomenon on the Right.
* a word that is only used by the Media. See fracas.
19 comments
Yes to all of that. I wrote a very similar passage in the update to this post.
The alleged fraud is not “voter fraud” but “registration fraud.” Practically no one actually succeeds at fraudulently casting a ballot; Mickey Mouse never makes it to the polls. When I was active as a deputy volunteer voter registrar, we were instructed to take all comers, verify that the forms were completely filled out, and leave the validation of content to the official county voter registrar. The notion that ACORN did something wrong here is absurd: they are the victims. Indeed, I’ve read of cases of ACORN assisting prosecutors pursuing those who fraudulently filled out the cards.
This is another example of the Republican Right to Rule: the Republican leaders feel they have such a right, and anytime it looks likely they might not win an election, they begin looking for ways to take the office anyway. Representative democracy means nothing to them, and voter suppression does not tweak their consciences one bit.
I don’t look at it as political, it is a straight forward matter of law. The questions are quite simple – What is crime? Who is the victim? Who committed the crime?
I like to stay with the criminal/penal law as it is much easier to explain to a jury.
From the stand point of a civil case, where is the standing for the Republican Party to claim an injury? What is the injury? The Supreme Court obviously doubts that the Republican Party has a case when it rules 9-0 that the requirement to verify every new registration against other state records is not warranted by the claims submitted.
Only government agencies have access to the data needed to verify a voter registration. ACORN has no means of legally verifying the information on the cards, and it is illegal in many jurisdictions for them to withhold any cards that have been filled out. The most ACORN could do is to submit the cards that they are suspicious of in a separate group and tell the election people of their concerns, but even that might be considered improper or illegal.
I’ve been reading about this (with admitted amusement) at C&L. 🙂 There’s a vid of Keith talking about it on Countdown.
Obama Campaign Calls For Investigation Into DOJ/McCain Collusion On ACORN Smears
And this one:
Conference Call With Obama campaign on McCain/Palin pushing Voter Fraud
*shrug* It’s just biz as usual from the Rethugs. 🙂 So, what’s new?
How’s the weather BTW? LOL
I use the word “kerfuffle.” It’s a great word.
They try this out every four years to suppress turn-out. It’s a PITA for local election officials and wastes a lot of money, but it must have some effect or they would stop doing it.
You read too many newspapers, Michael. Don’t tell me you use “fracas”, or I’ll accuse you of submitting entries to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
i love “kerfuffle”. even more fun to say than “fracas”.
ps. i did write something for the bulwer-lytton contest once or twice, several years ago. alas, i am not very good at that genre.
So, you’re saying you are not very good at being very bad 😉
Haven’t used “fracas” in a while, but yes, I do use it. Don’t read that many newspapers anymore–but I did go to a liberal-arts college and I do read widely.
alas, this is also true: i’m not very good at being bad. but a good writer ought to be able to intentionally produce a bulwer-lytton winner. apparently i am mediocre at both good and bad. 🙁
You need to get out more, Michael. 🙂
Prize-worthy bad prose is a gift given to few. There are naturals, like Bulwer-Lytton, but he didn’t realize his gift. I assume it is akin to good satire, which is rare indeed, as most people remain stuck with lampoon and can never make the next step.
When you work in an Elections Office, you learn a bunch of things you never knew. CA has been cursed with signature gathers and their little shinanigans (on all sides.) People have been coming into the office wanting to know if ACORN has been active in Santa Barbara. I don’t believe so. The groups that have been sent here to get folks registered have been YPM (the Repubs) and VERF (the Dems.) BOTH have been a nightmare. YPM has been switching people’s party affiliation and beating up voters. VERF refuses to allow the voters themselves to fill out the Reg Forms (can you say hundreds of mispelled names, addresses, etc.) and intimidating people to switch their registration.
I am of the firm belief that Reg Drives/Signature Gathering SHOULD NOT INCLUDE PAYMENT to those doing it.
It’s been a nightmare with these folks.
In Florida both sides have been pulling the same sort of things and the petitions are even worse with explanations of one initiative covering the real explanation of the real petition that people are signing, and the digital scanning of the address and signature block to be used for other petitions.
Reduce the number of signatures required, but require they be signed at an election office would be a better solution. They require that signatures be of registered voters, and the election office is the only place that can be verified.
In Florida when you change your address on your driver’s license you change your address on the voter registration at the same time, You can register at local government offices, the drivers’ license bureau, as well as the Supervisor of Elections office, so these drives aren’t necessary. If you can’t swing by an office to fill out a form, it is highly unlikely you will make it to the polls.
In regards to the voter fraud issue, you’ll love this then! LOL I’m sure McCains crooks won’t! 😉 😀
Arrest Made in Widening GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal
And with that, I bid you ‘good night’! 😀
This is only the second actual fraud case I’m aware of, the first being Ann Coulter’s case of forgetting where she lived in Florida.
OT:
Here’s a good summation of Miss Wasilla 1984 (Sarah Palin) resume for VP and probably President. If this doesn’t scare you… I’d have thought that her career in beauty pageants would have disqualified her for most people. *shrug*
McCain Picks Beauty Pageant Journalist Sarah Palin As Running Mate
The more I learn about her (which, admittedly isn’t much as she has the depth of a cardboard cutout), the more I have to laugh! 😀
Americans… LMAO
Mind you… on the plus side… she looked pretty good in ’84 topless. I can see why McCain chose her, and the rednecks want to vote for her. Maybe they think that if McCain has a stroke and she becomes Prez, she’ll work in the Oval Office topless. They watch too much ‘Naked News’. LMAO It’s only when she opens her mouth that she has a problem. 😀
Personally, I think her real problem is having to go along with the McCain campaign. She isn’t what she appears to be as a candidate. Her record in Alaska says she’s a populist politician who does what the majority wants. That sounds wonderful until you factor in the population of Alaska, which is not exactly known for thinking things through or taking the long term view.
She has always had a sizable mandate when elected, but she doesn’t follow the “party line”, which has angered a lot of the Republican establishment in Alaska. It’s the Republicans who are attacking her in her home state. The Democrats go along just on general principles, because she is a Republican, but it’s the Republican Party of Alaska that wants to destroy her.
It would very difficult indeed for her to be worse that the current occupant of the White House, but I’m not anxious to find out what she would decide is the “will of the people”.
I think her real problem is that she is 100% unsuited to the role of either VP or Prez. You are talking about someone whose entire ‘World View'(tm) is summed up as ‘We have to get THEM before they get us!’ with the *them* part being extremely vague. You are talking about putting this person in charge of the US nuclear arsenal as CinC! Pardon me for thinking this may make pretty much the entire World a tad nervous, some of which also have nukes, and they may decide she is right and a preemptive strike is the best option. She thinks she’s John Wayne in a bra! Someone should explain that he was just an actor, and his movies were Hollywood fiction. In the real World, the *good guys* usually get killed more often than the bad.
She and anyone like here is the very *LAST* nut you want in charge of anything right now. That plus the fact she is a complete BS artiste and I’m amazed she even tells her name truthfully.
Keith get’s it:
Special Comment: What is “pro-America”, Senator?
She isn’t *Pro-America*, she’s just a greedy clueless hick in way above her head. She should have stuck to Catwalks. If she’s so ‘Pro-America’, why is it OK for her husband to belong to a group that wants Alaska to secede from the USA (A very good idea I might add. I can think of several other States that should also secede, the concept of which is amusing, given that the USA is a Republic of States anyway). LOL
The current incumbent is to much of a chickenshit to start a Nuclear war. She’s too stupid to be that scared.
Meeehhh… *shrug*
Most of what is you are citing is propaganda spread by the Democrats, and you can’t believe anything Olbermann says about women as the man has serious issues with women politicians.
Todd Palin hasn’t been a member of the AIP since 2002, he has been registered as an independent voter since them.
The AIP wants a vote on the status of Alaska, based on their belief that the original statehood vote in 1958 didn’t include all of the options. Other than that single issue they are pretty much a standard libertarian party.
The Palins haven’t been members of the Pentecostal church since 2003, they moved to another evangelical church that is not related to any national groups. No one seems to know this, as the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, the church she left in 2003, is the one everyone fixates on.
No one is prepared to be President of the United States, but Sarah Palin is campaigning in support of John McCain, and many of the “positions” she takes are the positions of John McCain, not Sarah Palin. She didn’t ask to be McCain’s running mate.
She is probably more intelligent that McCain based on her college achievement, but that is not something she is allowed by the system to show.
She does listen to her advisors, and changes her mind based on the introduction of new facts.
I’m not voting for any of the major parties in this election because I don’t see a lot of difference in the decisions they have made – they went with the flow for political gain and don’t seem to have any core principles.
Both sides are lying like hell, and it didn’t take me long to discover that. Neither side will be good for foreign policy, as neither side can think globally. Both sides have terrible advisors who advocate failed policies.
The manner in which we select candidates is a disgrace. The media has entirely too much power over the process and they don’t like people with good ideas. They wanted a “story” and they pushed to get one. The media was looking for a foreign policy/national security election and got blind-sided by the economy.
Mitt Romney would be a better choice for the Republicans and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats because they have better credentials for the current reality, but the media didn’t like them.
I don’t write about this election beyond local issues because I have no interest in the outcome. It will be bad regardless and no one wants me to “harsh their mellow” with the truth of the disaster they helped to create.
Bad politicians don’t have 85% approval ratings unless there is a major disaster, but that was Palin’s approval rating in Alaska before she was pulled into this mess by McCain’s advisors. She isn’t the person you think you see in the media or her ratings wouldn’t have been that high.