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THE SELF-PERPETUATING FAKE VOTE FRAUD SCAM.
Yglesias says most of what needs to be said about the winger hysteria about the fact that large-scale voter vote drives inevitably lead to some errors. The rhetoric notwithstanding, registration "fraud" is very different from vote fraud, and in fact the former is extremely unlikely to lead to non-negligible amounts of the latter. Even if somehow the fake names get through and are registered to vote it doesn't actually matter in terms of the integrity of elections since "Mickey Mouse" and "Amanda Huggenkiss" and "Al Koholic" can't actually show up to vote because they don't exist. Until Glenn Reynolds et al. can actually find an example of "Foghorn Leghorn" actually being permitted to vote, this is a trivial issue that certainly doesn't constitute "vote fraud."
As Matt says if for some reason it was critically important for virtually every single name collected in mass voter registration drives to be accurate, there's an obvious solution in effect in many other liberal democracies: have professionals trained by the government be responsible for ensuring that citizens are registered. Of course, we're not going to hear about that remedy from people frothing at the mouth about ACORN because the point isn't to make registration a perfect process, but rather to use inevitable errors as a pretext to suppress legitimate voters. Since the Supreme Court has declared that you can do this even if there's literally no evidence that anyone in the state has fraudulently voted based on an erroneous registration, this is going to get worse before it gets better.
--Scott Lemieux
COMMENTS (3)
What's important here is not teaching people the difference between voter fraud and voter registration fraud.
What's important is pointing out to people that ACORN got scammed by the people it hired, the exact same way a company that hired a traveling salesman who made up his sales got scammed. They were given lists of fake voters, the same way a lying salesman gives his boss a list of fake buyers.
It's important also to point out that the people who are making these allegations are professional Republican political operatives who know how the business works. They know full well that ACORN got scammed, and that this kind of thing is incredibly harmful to ACORN's bottom line.
The thing we should be asking is why Republicans are going on TV and lying that ACORN benefited from employee scams that they know full well actually harm ACORN.
We should also be asking why the self-claimed professional political journalists at FOX news are so ignorant or so duplicitious that they are not calling out the Republican operatives on these falsehoods.
Posted by: anonymiss | October 14, 2008 12:02 PM
Why accept the Republican framing with the term "registration fraud" ?
The facts are that invalid registration forms were given to ACORN (and others) but ACORN is legally required to submit them. ACORN is assisting the state governments in weeding out the invalid forms. A better description is ACORN is validating or confirming the accuracy of the registration forms. Using terms like "validation", "confirmation", "accuracy", etc., would frame the issue better and avoid a defensive or explanatory posture.
Posted by: H-Bob | October 14, 2008 2:50 PM
Why accept the Republican framing with the term "registration fraud" ?
The facts are that invalid registration forms were given to ACORN (and others) but ACORN is legally required to submit them. ACORN is assisting the state governments in weeding out the invalid forms. A better description is ACORN is validating or confirming the accuracy of the registration forms. Using terms like "validation", "confirmation", "accuracy", etc., would frame the issue better and avoid a defensive or explanatory posture.
Posted by: H-Bob | October 14, 2008 2:51 PM