The legal harassment of ACORN is really starting to get on my nerves. It started with the raid of their Las Vegas office in October 2008.
The Nevada office of ACORN had planned a potluck dinner at its Las Vegas office Tuesday night to celebrate the 80,000 newly registered voters its staff had signed up in Clark County as part of its work with low-income communities nationwide.
Instead, their office was raided Tuesday morning by agents of the Nevada Secretary of State and Attorney General who alleged in an application for a search warrant that ACORN had hired 59 felons through a work release program as canvassers and submitted nearly 300 apparently fraudulent voter registration cards as part of the drive.
ACORN hires felons because felons need work. If they don’t get work they will be sorely tempted to revert back to a life of crime. I can’t believe it is appropriate to use their work-release program (which is a public service) as probable cause to raid their offices. And those 300 fraudulent registration cards? They’re supposed to get weeded out by the staff before they are submitted to the Board of Elections. But, in some states, ACORN is required to turn in any and all cards they receive. In that case, they try to bundle the ones they consider suspect in a pile. You want to know how you get a fraudulent form?
One ex-employee of ACORN reached by the state investigator told him she began making up names for her forms on days when it was too hot to work outside. ACORN canvassers are paid by the hour. Ex-employees also said they were expected to collect 20 complete forms a shift or risk probation and termination, the investigator said in his affidavit.
Yes, ACORN sets a loose standard of 20 forms a shift. Few employees consistently get twenty, but if they consistently get more than ten they are considered good workers. Employees that cannot get more than ten forms a shift are put on probation, given more hands-on training, and (if there is no improvement) they are terminated. Therefore, shitty employees have an incentive to forge cards. ACORN knows this, and they set up procedures to screen for bad cards. This includes checking signatures and calling a percentage of the phone numbers provided on the forms. It seems in Nevada they even assigned the forms by serial number, which is a new innovation from when I worked with ACORN in 2004.
ACORN’s internal checks, Mellor said, included tracking forms assigned to canvassers using serial numbers and worker sign-offs on each form and following up with listed voters by phone to verify they had taken part in the registration drive. The search warrant mentions those procedures.
ACORN identified 44 workers who had submitted false forms and they turned that info over to the state. In spite of this, the state moved to indict two former registration drive leaders. Here is the statement of ACORN’s executive director Steven Kest:
Politicians in Nevada are at it again. Seven months after executing a carefully staged raid on the Las Vegas ACORN office – a publicity stunt purporting to gather evidence of “voter fraud” in ACORN’s 2008 voter registration drive – Nevada’s attorney general and secretary of state today announced that they were filing a complaint against ACORN and two voter registration managers. Specifically, the complaint alleges that ACORN implemented a “corporate mandated quota system,” and that bonuses were paid for exceeding this quota, in violation of a Nevada statute that prohibits payment based on the total number of registrations.
What the attorney general and secretary of state did NOT announce were any indictments against any of the 44 individual canvassers ACORN identified, as early as April 2008, as having submitted fraudulent applications to their supervisors. If Nevada officials were truly interested in protecting the integrity of the registration process they would cooperate with ACORN in seeking prosecution against these individuals. Instead, after seven months, the state of Nevada has chosen to divert attention from their failure and attempt to justify their attacks against ACORN with this ridiculous complaint.
If you were to work at a Bennigans making steaks and burgers, you would need to in fact make food to retain your employment. Even university professors must “publish or perish.” ACORN, like any business or professional organization, establishes standards for performance and a reasonable basis for evaluating its employees. For canvassers, who are paid by the hour to assist members of the public in completing voter registration applications, these expectations are based on the only measurement that makes sense: the number of complete and accurate voter registration applications a canvasser collects per shift. Based on years of experience conducting community-based voter registration drives, ACORN has established 20 applications per four-hour shift as a reasonable performance standard.
Performance standards do not represent a “quota,” or payment per registration, but simply a baseline for job performance. And, as the complaint itself makes clear, failing to meet this standard does not result in automatic termination. ACORN supervisors are trained to evaluate canvassers on a case-by-case basis, and are given wide latitude in determining the appropriate course of action for under-performing canvassers, ranging from re-training or reassignment to disciplinary action or dismissal.
Moreover, the statute invoked in the complaint does not even address such job performance standards, nor does it address the situation in the Nevada office, in which unauthorized but moderate bonuses (in the amount of five-dollars per shift) were awarded in September to canvassers who exceeded expectations. In fact, the poorly written statute merely states that it is illegal to pay anyone to register voters based on the total number of voters registered. ACORN canvassers are paid and evaluated by the hour. The absurd legal interpretation under which the complaint has been brought suggests that it is illegal for a voter registration drive to set ANY job performance standards for hourly employees, or to evaluate employees and hold them accountable. In effect, their interpretation of the law would make conducting a paid voter registration drive impossible.
Few states need active and effective voter registration drives more than Nevada, which rates 50th out of 51 states (including the District of Columbia) in voter registration rates. Over 900,000 of 1.6 million eligible Nevadans remain unregistered, including 106,000 of the state’s 199,000 eligible low-income residents. ACORN’s registration drive, by election officials’ own conservative estimate, resulted in over 23,000 new Nevada voters casting a ballot in the 2008 election.
There will surely be a fierce hue and cry in the media over these charges; for that is, after all, largely the point. We look forward to the opportunity to beat back these false claims. Meanwhile, ACORN members will continue to fight for quality affordable healthcare, for living wage jobs, and to stop home foreclosures. And yes, we will continue to fight for the government to do its job and provide a means for universal voter registration for every citizen.
Registering poor Latinos and blacks to vote shouldn’t land you in jail.
Somehow I think the current USDOJ is likely to take a different approach toward harrassment like this than the previous one did. I think maybe Nevada didn’t get the memo.
This could have been me getting indicted in 2004. That’s why I take this so personally.
It’s pure harrassment. They have no case. They’re just trying to intimidate potential voters and those who are working to register them.
Sorry, I couldn’t even read this post. This whole harassment campaign enrages me to the point of fantasizing murder. It may seem like a trivial problem given the condition of this country, but it’s a perfect picture of the ongoing battle to keep the royalists in unchallenged power. Makes me wonder anew whether what’s happened to us is fixable by any electoral process.
It’s worth reading. It’s straight out of Mississippi circa 1964.
Cross post?
It deserves more eyes.
There’s a solution to this problem, though most everyone is likely to object to some part of it, and some of the security details are left as an exercise to the reader, as are absentee and mail-in ballots:
Voter registration becomes universal and mandatory upon a citizen’s 18th birthday, kind of like Selective Service registration is for males. You get a federal voter ID card with a unique identifying number prohibited by law from being used for any other purpose. Using said card, you can vote in any federal election wherever you happen to be.
Whenever you change your address, you go to the local post office to submit forms and present your federal voter ID. Your ID number is entered, by the post office, into their database. State and local elections generate their lists of eligible voters from the USPS database. Registering your primary residential address with the post office becomes mandatory.
Federal standards for voting machines and ballot formats specify a uniform electronic voting machine standard with an auditable paper trail and live network connections to the federal election system over a secure VPN. When the polls are open — which shall by law be for a period of at least two weeks before election day — you can go to any federally operated voting location and vote in the federal elections, as well as the state and local elections connected to your registered primary residential address.
Finally, voting becomes mandatory and all employers are required by law to give their employees one paid day off per election period. (Note: by mandatory, I do not mean that you have to vote for anyone on the ballot; I understand the objections some people have to “legitimizing” a system they object to. But you do have to show up at the polls and indicate to the voting system that you intend to cast no vote.)
The current system of voter registration is essentially a means of suppressing voting. I’m not sure if the above is a total fix, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Evangelicals will fight this tooth-and-nail as evidence of the “Mark of the Beast”. It’s why we don’t already have a Federal ID card. I think it’s a good idea myself, but it would be a huge battle because of the superstitious nonsense, the real worries about government intrusion and privacy, and the worries about the expense of maintaining that database.
(I’d also not make it mandatory to keep your record updated, but I would have it automatically update when you fill out a change of address card at the Post Office, when you get a new driver’s license, or when you file your Federal, State or Local income taxes. That would cover most people already as a side effect of things that they already do without having to worry about using the coercive power of the state to force them to keep it updated.)
Screw that – I’d fight this one tooth-and-nail. I don’t want to see someone fined or thrown in jail for not voting – that’s just plain stupid.
On the other hand – extending “election day” to “election month”, implementing some sane absentee voter requirements, and generally opening up the window of when and how people can vote so that they don’t actually have to take time out of their schedule to go to the polls, stand in line, and cast a ballot are things I can get behind. Even something as simple as having the polls open for a full week – including the weekend – would ensure that many more people would have a free day to get to the polls and vote.
But mandatory voting with state-imposed penalties for not taking part? No way – I can’t get behind that at all. I’m all for making it easier to get people who want to vote to the polls, and to encouraging people who don’t normally vote to go vote, but I’m not willing to break out the sticks to metaphorically beat people into voting whether they want to or not.
I’ve been following this since it started and the whole thing stinks. Once a judge gets hold of it, it should be tossed out. No one is going to jail here.
But that’s not their goal. Their goal is to get publicity. For example, Lou Dobbs last night reported on this and for each time he said “Acorn” he also added a comment about their association with Barack Obama and his 2008 campaign, implying that his campaign was fraudulent. I’m sure every Fox News show is doing the same thing several times per hour, just like they did before the election when this whole thing blew up the first time.
It’s got the tea-bagging rednecks all worked up here in Nevada. They can’t stand that Obama won the state and that their state party is crumbling just like the national one is. (Even they can’t stand our Republican elected officials.) In that respect, it’s fun to watch. But by smearing Acorn, they may also succeed in smearing all Democrats, leading people to believe that the Dems in the state are just as corrupt (by their association with Acorn) as we all know the thieving Repub’s to be, discouraging participation in the system by regular folks (who would probably vote Democrat if they were paying attention to the issues.)
too bad the Democrats are behind this.
That’s had me stumped as well.
It’s all a matter of how one defines “those people” – it’s not necessarily along party lines…