Nuts to Voters

Jay Tea at Wizbang looks at possible fallout from ACORN's voter registration drive.

So, ACORN has turned in all these bogus voter registrations. In one noted case, they turned in over 5,000 registrations in Lake County, Indiana. Officials started verifying them, then quit after checking 2,100 of them -- and could not find a single valid one among them.

Some people wonder at what the big deal is. Let's take that Lake County, Indiana example. Let's say that those 2,100 rejected registrations were part of some grand conspiracy to screw skew the vote, and the other 2,900 were all valid registration forms. That would mean that the same people who filed those registrations had 2,100 people ready to show up at the polls on election day and cast their vote (presumably for Obama).

That, obviously, is absurd.

But could the goal be something else? Another attempt at something less flagrant?

Here's an alternate theory. Mixed in among all the red herrings (Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald, Tony Romo) are enough less obvious fake names -- but ones chosen to be a bit more memorable to those ready to step up on election day and use it.

For me, I'd use "Joe Tormolen." It's an utterly unremarkable name, but it's memorable for me because it has the same initials as my own name. Also, it's the name of a character from a classic "Star Trek" episode -- he was the guy who first got infected and then died in "The Naked Time." I used that name when I needed a protagonist for my stories about the fictional USS Manchester.

So all I'd have to do would be to arrange for "Joe Tormolen" to be registered in several voting districts around the area, take the day off from work (presuming that I, working for ACORN, actually had a job apart from them), and go cast all the ballots I could. All I'd need would be a list of the addresses "Joe" was registered from, because in many states the Democrats have made it almost a felony to ask a voter for any form of ID at the polls.

With the right planning and a full tank of gas, I could probably cast a hundred votes alone.

But what's 100 votes, even here in New Hampshire? Is that really that big a deal?

Yes. As far as I'm concerned, even a single fraudulent vote is one too many. Because every person who votes more than once cancels out the vote of another person, effectively depriving them of their right to vote. And worse, they might not even know that they have been denied their right.

Again, that requires a bit of a conspiracy, and I don't like conspiracies. So how about a few alternatives that don't require so much work?

Well, how about setting up grounds for discounting the electoral results? Salting the mine, as it were?

Here's how it could play out:

Come election day, and McCain wins. Folks start looking at certain cities and counties where Obama either lost, or didn't win by the margin they expected. They start looking, and they see that voter turnout -- as a percentage of registered voters -- is considerably lower than they expected, too. Why, that is tantamount to PROOF that the eeeevil, racist Rethuglicans succeeded in their diabolical plans to oppress the poor and minorities and the oppressed stayed away from the polls, instead of exercising their Constitutional right to vote!

But it isn't.

You know the saying "figures don't lie, but liars can figure?" That's what would be happening here. The percentage of registered voters turning out would be thrown off because those registered voters would include all those bogus ones made up by ACORN. In the Lake County, Indiana, example, that was 5,000 registrations.

Lake County has about 484,000 people. Let's say that 150,000 of them are registered voters. (The first source I could find indicates that is a pretty good approximation -- and notes that in the last voter record cleansing, almost half of the names were removed. I've fudged it up slightly to make my math simpler.) Come election day, thanks to ACORN's 5,000 bogus registrations, we've pretty much guaranteed that a full 3% of registered voters won't show up -- because they don't exist. That is pretty much all the evidence some people will need to "prove" that somehow the bloody peasants of Lake County were being oppressed by the inherent violence in the system.

Subtle? Yes. Too subtle? I think not.

And indeed, people are still wringing their hands over the "stolen" 2000 election. Repeat a canard often enough and loudly enough, and people will take it seriously.  But there's a more basic point he makes:

But there's something even far more important here, something far more fundamental than some grand conspiracies for stealing the election:

These people are assing around with our electoral process.

That is something that can never, ever, EVER be tolerated.

Earlier today, he looked at the economics behind ACORN's operations. (Economics, in this case, defined as "the organized study of how people respond to incentives.)

First up, let's bring back the profit motive here. In our society, once an organization declares itself a non-profit, it doesn't automatically become exempt from the basic laws of economics. It simply redefines those terms. They still need to take in money to operate, and they still need to show some productive results to sustain that income. The differences are that the productive results are not financial, and the people who supply them with the money are not the actual consumers of those productive results. In other words, they don't have to produce something of value, just convince their backers that they have -- because those backers aren't actually buying the product or service for themselves.

In ACORN's case here, they have chosen to define their "profit" as gross numbers of new voter registrations. The bigger the number they can claim to have registered, the greater their success and "profit" they can boast about and convince their backers that their money was well spent. It's a simple equation: more voters registered equals more success.

There are complications, of course. There are only a finite number of eligible voters out there to be tapped. And while that number is always expanding as people are either turning 18 or becoming citizens faster than they are dying or giving up their citizenship or becoming convicted felons, it's nowhere near as fast a growth as ACORN needs.

But it's raw numbers that ACORN is interested in, not confirmed numbers. There is absolutely no incentive for ACORN to perform any kind of quality control on those numbers. Indeed, in many states, that is barred by law -- they are obligated to turn over any and all voter registrations to local officials, even if they are utterly convinced that it is fraudulent. Sure, they can indicate those they think are suspicious, but they don't have to.