Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
But a non-profit doesn't have the same motivation, right? So one must ask *why* you'd have policies in place which certainly appear designed to maximize the likelihood of fraudulent registrations.
Which policies, specifically?
The policy of tying compensation/advancement/employment to number of registrations gained. This was widespread within the entire organization (at least the parts that were involved with registrations).
How did you not know this was what I was talking about? I'm pretty sure I mentioned this directly at least a few times in the post you just replied to.
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My understanding is that ACORN had a legal obligation to submit any voter registrations given to them. Those they deemed fraudulent were flagged before being given to the state but they still had to be given over.
You're the only one talking about the process by which said fraudulent registrations were discovered Joph. You keep jumping up and down and repeating this as though it excuses the entire issue. It doesn't.
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Whether or not people were paid for those registrations isn't something really made clear.
What?! What hasn't been made clear is that allegation you keep making that all of these fraudulent registrations were found and flagged by ACORN themselves. What has been made abundantly clear is that ACORN did in fact have policies in place which encouraged people to submit false registrations. Whether those were in the form of quotas you had to meet, bonuses dangled in front of people, or straight pay-per-registration schemes, it's a very common theme.
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Because in Nevada the actual organization itself violated the registration laws of that state by compensating their workers based on numbers of registrations.
Workers in Nevada were paid an hourly wage but had to meet performance standards and could get a bonus for exceeding them. In their eyes, this was not paying workers per number of registrations in a piecemeal manner as the law would imply.
And how about in your eyes? No matter how they justified it, they were still creating a financial incentive for their employees to register more voters. Can we please agree that this *isn't* what a non-profit voter registration group should be doing? And can we also agree that this creates an incentive for people to falsify voter registrations?
That was the argument I was making. I happen to think that if you create financial incentives for people to register more voters, you're going to get a bunch of fraudulent registrations. Thus, organizations shouldn't be doing that. Unless, of course, their intention is to get a bunch of fraudulent registrations.
I'll ask the question I asked in my earlier post again: Why do this? What possible honest reason could a non-profit voter registration organization have to tie financial incentives to quantities of voters registered? Do any of them outweigh the absolutely certain result of increased bogus registrations? I just don't think so. The only honest reason I can think of is if they don't trust their employees to actually do any work at all (folks take the money and then don't do any canvassing for registrations at all). Um... But if that's the issue, then how does creating a financial incentive help? I think you'd have to be a moron not to noodle out what's going to happen.
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Actually, one of the people from (former) Nevada ACORN is expected to plea non contest to charges of violating the law while challenging its constitutionality. The motive was simple -- get people to work hard by offering additional compensation for going over the minimum to keep your job. Seriously, you think that can only mean a desire to commit fraud? Some capitalist you are.
This is non-profit work though Joph. I already covered this. If there were a profit motive involved, I could see it. But with no profit motive, then capitalism isn't involved, right? Some other motive is. What could it be? Why waste funds creating incentives to register more voters? The folks running the non-profit shouldn't care how many people are registered. It should not matter at all, in fact. Why then create incentives to get people to increase registrations? Why create quotas? Why tie advancement to this?
It's not about getting people to "work hard" Joph. The fruits of that labor aren't themselves monetary in nature. There are far more effective methods to ensure that workers are doing the jobs they're employed to do. Supervision would be a good start. There are many others.
If I asked you to come up with a way to maximize the number of fraudulent registrations generated, aside from committing the fraud yourself (and I assume *you* don't want to go to jail), can you think of a better way to do it than creating exactly the kinds of incentive programs that ACORN used? At what point do you abandon the whole "it just happened and they didn't intend it at all!"?