Nuts Over ACORN

This is such a ridiculous controversy. The GOP story carried in the liberal media gives the impression that ACORN is actively attempting to file false voter registrations in an effort to steal the election. HuffPo explains that the truth is very different:

The media has been all too happy to pass that garbage on, without bothering to note that, in fact, the organization attempts to authenticate every registration form their workers submit and by law they must turn in every form to election officials -- even if they find a registration to be fraudulent when they call the phone number submitted on the form, or if the forms are otherwise suspect or incomplete.

They do so, and they flag all questionable registration forms as being suspect before turning them in to officials.

ACORN casts a wide net to get as many people registered as possible. Part of that effort is hiring people to register voters and paying per registration form. As a result, they receive some false forms that are in no way going to be used for voting. As Obama notes, the only victim of fraud here is ACORN, who has paid people with the expectation of getting valid registrations.

Nevertheless, registering a million voters and getting tens of thousands of false registration forms is still a success. Yglesias:

I find that an awful lot of problems are caused by people’s inability to understand things like error rates and big numbers. If a pharmaceutical company came out with a new anti-depression drug and gave it to a million people suffering from depression, of whom 970,000 were helped you wouldn’t turn around and conclude that the company was perpetrating a deliberate fraud based on the fact that “tens of thousands” of patients got no relief. You’d say that the medicine was helpful in 97 percent of the indicated cases. ACORN is trying — and succeeding — in an effort to register a lot of new voters.

There’s simply no way to gather over one million new voter registration forms without some of the forms having been filled out with bogus information. You could ask the group to automatically toss out the obviously wrong ones — some guy saying he’s Tony Romo, someone else saying he’s Mickey Mouse — but the law requires them to hand all the forms in to prevent them from tossing out forms filled out by people who say they want to register Republican. Consequently, if you go out and register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people and also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.

I agree with Yglesias that the best solution to this problem is to make it easier to vote instead of requiring registration weeks or months in advance.

Voter suppression, often carried out in the name of preventing voter fraud, distorts the electoral process far more than actual voter fraud. The outcomes of both the 2000 and 2004 elections may have been altered by voter suppression.