-- So am I wrong in thinking Mr. Jacoby may have fraudulently registered at a California address in order to comply with a law that could not have been enforced against him in the first place? --
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I think you're right. But I see the law that he flouted not so much as one that could be used against him, it would be used to invalidate the "signatures he gathered."
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IOW, his disqualification to gather signatures doesn't carry a personal penalty.
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OTOH, his falsification for the purpose of registering himself to vote in CA is a violation, and ought to be punished to the full extent of the law.

Thank God it was a Republican that got caught.

Wow, a dozens and dozens in California? That could give McCain, 5 or 6 more votes and he could actually only lose by 29 points instead of thirty.

Funny hoq quick the trusty MSM was on that one.

The voters said YPM tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

I find it odd that someone could be "tricked" into thinking they were signing a petition, if the form they were signing was labeled "Voter Registration". Makes me wonder if he was convincing illiterates to register.

I'd give plenty of credence to someone who was tricked by a fine-print contract full of legalese, but voter reg forms are pretty hard to disguise as a petition.

Anyone who uses the buzzword "MSM" should be disqualified from voting.

Anyone who uses the buzzword "MSM" should be disqualified from voting.

seconded.

Wow, they move fast when it's a republican.

I figure about the time Obama has finished his second term, the FBI will conclude that their investigation proves that ACORN was wrongly accused by those despicable, rightwing Palinitlerites in the 2008 elections.

I'm amazed that anyone takes seriously the claim that ACORN has engaged in massive registration fraud. Not only is there no evidence for this, but ACORN's explanation that it flags questionable registration forms itself (and that it must submit them rather then destroying them as a matter of law in most states) has gone unrebutted. The FBI investigation probably won't take very long at all because there is nothing much to investigate.

-- At least where I vote, they mark your name off when you vote. If somebody else claiming to be me, with my address, shows up. he's out of luck. --
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Manufactured votes don't require the presence of a voter. They just require the presence of an unvoted registration. You know, like when dead people vote? They aren't actually in the polling place.

Dunno how it works where you live, cboldt, but dead folks don't vote where I live.

You have to walk up (or, at the least, roll up in a wheelchair), which dead people are not so good at; or, you can file some paperwork, but it's not so automatic that a vote by, say, Mickey Mouse, would be processed.

Sheesh.

Do you have any evidence, at all, that there is something coordinated going on between mostly elderly poll volunteers and ACORN?

Or is this just more of the feverished attempt by Fox et al. to lay the groundwork for explaining away the upcoming election defeat as "we wuz robbed"

Without making any assertion as to its liklihood, processing the 'admittedly suspect' registrations ACORN submits could still occupy the time a SoS's office would otherwise use to vet the rest of ACORN's product. Anyone know if this actually happens?

Harry wrote

I am not persuaded that ACORN had a sophisticated, foolproof scheme operating to gain access to ballots for hundreds of thousands of ineligible or even non-existent voters.

Why does it have to be either, given that there are lots of unregistered people eligible to vote and that the barriers to voting fraud are much higher than that to registration fraud?

Also, Harry the traditional way that great-grandpa votes is to send the beggar on the corner to do it for him for a couple of bucks.

It isn't necessarily the poll volunteers that would be doing the stuffing, but the actual election officials that in many jurisdictions are elected and partisan.

This conspiracy theory is ridiculous. So, let's get this straight.

1) Election officials, nationwide, in a coordinated effort with ACORN, make sure that there are significant number of false registrations on file

2) On election day, said election official uses these fake names to vote (when, where, and how of it nevermind, despite polling places being in lockdown and thousands of observers stationed across the county)

3) This is done nationwide, in large scale, and manages to be completely secret and not one word leaks out about it.

Really? Really?!?

And, if you are an election official hell-bent on throwing an election, why bother with ACORN in the first place? Presumably if you have time to cast hundreds of fake votes on election day, you would have all the time in the world before the election to fake the registrations themselves, without having to bring ACORN into the conspiracy. Cut out the unreliable middleman...

ZOMBIE VOTERS!!! ZOMBIE VOTERS!!!

"Ostensibly in the name of the registered (but non-existent) voter, it's not that difficult for a dozen votes here, a couple dozen votes there, to be recorded fraudulently."

I can accept that a certain amount of "fraudulent" voting goes on (like when a husband dictates his wife's vote or when a caretaker fills out a ballot for an elderly voter who may not be fully aware of what is going on). But you also have to acknowledge that it's likely happened in every election and in many localities to the benefit of both Republicans and Democrats.

JosephSlater:

1) You keep talking about "nationwide." Voter fraud need not be nationwide in order to successfully swing a presidential election. Remember Florida? A few thousand votes in a couple of key swing states is sufficient to alter the outcome.

2) Little "coordination" is needed. First of all, by submitting tens of thousands of registrations, thousands of them bogus, ACORN insures that the local officials will be so overwhelmed that they can do very little vetting of the names. It takes time to actually drive up to an address to see if it's even physically possible for 100 people to all live there. Even "Mickey Mouse" has to be checked, because people name their kids weird things these days, and you can't know for sure without actually checking. So all the local registrar of voters has to do is process the forms with little if any checking because, you know, they don't have a huge staff for that.

3) Poll commissioners are not uniformly honest, nor are they all old retired people. In nice, clean, up-scale precincts, sure, they have a better chance of having several reliable, honest poll commissioners working, and it would be hard to get them to throw the election. But in other places, people aren't always so innately honest and selfless that they would pass up the chance to earn a few extra hundred dollars. All it really takes is one out-and-out crooked poll commissioner in a precinct, and for the other commissioners to take the afternoon off an hour before the polls close. Then the crooked one can easily see who has and hasn't voted, and cast votes on behalf of a bunch of them.

4) Again on the point of coordination, the crooked commissioner doesn't have to have some list of the fraudulently registered voters, supplied to him by ACORN or whomever. All he needs is a large number of registrations in his precinct who are unlikely to vote. If he waits to an hour, even a half hour, before the polls closed (hell, he can wait until just after, and claim that the machine closed late because there was a long line), then the odds of anybody coming in and trying to vote after he's fraudulently voted for them is slim. And worst case scenario, one such voter does, and that voter is conscientious enough to spot that he's being asked to sign on a line not his own name, and even more conscientious (and brave) enough to report it, well, then that's just one mistake, right? Can't prosecute an over-worked poll commissioner for one little mistake, can you? Surely that one little mistake couldn't influence the election, what's the big deal?

5) You ignore absentee ballots, where there are NO poll commissioners. Again, this scam relies heavily on the small budgets allotted to elections officials, and our general unwillingness to toss any votes out, without specific proof of the fraudulency of each and every one of them. If tens of thousands of phony registrations end up on the list, because the registrar doesn't have the resources to track down each and every one, then a committed fraudster could, without any involvement from elections officials at all, submit absentee votes for all of those phony registrations. Once in the pipeline, they are almost certain to be counted.

In nice, clean, up-scale precincts, sure, they have a better chance of having several reliable, honest poll commissioners working, and it would be hard to get them to throw the election. But in other places, people aren't always so innately honest and selfless that they would pass up the chance to earn a few extra hundred dollars.

I'm trying hard not to see this, but it reads like:
Wealthy whites = honest
Poor minorities = dishonest

That might not be your intention, but perhaps you could clarify.

My understanding is that almost all polling places have observers from both political parties present.

All it takes is a large enough group of like-objective determined people, sufficient number of which are willing to bribe, intimidate and otherwise cheat, and votes can be manufactured.

So it's not a conspiracy, it's a Stand Alone Complex?

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall

I think the point was made above but it is worth repeating actual voter fraud by sending someone to the poll is retail. It can have an effect when there are a small number of voters for sure, but is unlikely to do so in larger ones.

Regarding even having to check out Mickey Mouse because people name their children weird things nowadays. It doesn't have to be weird, just a not-so-obvious joke. Mouse does exist as a last name; given the not-quite-obvious joke names I've seen given to my friends over the years, I expect there is at least one Michael Mouse out there who goes by Mickey. (I roomed with Bruce Wayne in college a couple of decades ago. Joke or not?)

I did a quick search of an on-line phonebook for California, and found several "M. Mouse" and "Mickey Mouse" entries (though I suspect that the one for 500 S Buena Vista St, Burbank has very large ears). A few show up hidden among the Disney, Tales of the City, and George Michael mouse pad links on Google as well.

The NY Post today has a front page article about several maroons from NYC who rented a house in Ohio, moved there for 30 days, registered to vote, and then moved back home to NY where they voted in Ohio by absentee ballot. If you were thinking these must have been ignorant, poor people, guess again. They were wealthy, highly educated New Yorkers. Oh, and by the way, they were all Obama supporters.

Happily, the local DA in Ohio is investigating them for vote fraud. I wonder if ignorance of the law is a defense here since they are claiming that they thought they could register in Ohio just by living there for 30 days - the law in Ohio is that you have to have the intent to remain permanently in order to register to vote. Any Ohio election law experts out there?

Perhaps the prosecutor has a different standard of what "ample evidence" means than the blogosphere does.

That bears repeating. Doubly so in threads about voter fraud.

'In general, however, it's easier to find somebody willing to take a $100 bribe in an area where the average annual income is $10,000 then in an area where it's $40,000.'

This has never been my experience. I am in the $40K+ category and I get offered bribes in $100 range couple times a month. It's all genteel, and not usually cash, but it is what it is.

Anyhow, it still seems to me that ACORN's subtle plot to overturn the will of the electorate wasn't quite subtle enough, since it's been sussed by a bunch of blog commenters without even rising from the keyboards.

I was rather more concerned about those $1,200 bribes the Bush administration passed out in May, but apparently everybody has forgotten them in the rush of later events.

Yes ACORN is completely innocent of any wrong doing at any level.

The problem for ACORN is that what they do isnt a one off. There is a pattern.

I really think a good deal of the solution is to end third party registrants. If third parties want to get people registered, they should help haul the people to the places to legally register. This should cut down on fraudulent registrations and possibly some double and triple registrations.

PDXLawyer --

I appreciate the explanation for your concern regards to registration fraud. It sounds like your concern is that voter registration fraud means that a crew of malicious poll workers who is determined to stuff the ballot box, can stuff a few more ballots. OK.

But I suggest we look at this quantitatively. I expect the number of fraudulent registrations is (at most) a very small fraction of the overall number of registered voters. As a consequence, the effect on the number of bogus ballots that rogue poll workers can introduce is very small, in relative terms. I expect that the fraction of registrations that are fraudulent is so small that it probably has only a minor impact on ballot-stuffing attacks.

It seems to me there are other, better ways to deal with ballot stuffing. If the concern was truly about ballot-stuffing, it seems to me the rational response would be to focus on other methods that are more effective at countering ballot-stuffing: e.g., randomized assignment of poll workers (to break up conspiracies), chain of custody protections, stronger transparency provisions, election observers, roster reconciliation (where you reconcile the number of voters who signed in against the number of cast ballots), better signature checking, statistical sampling of the roster sheets to poll voters and find out whether they really did vote, and the like. But my experience is that folks who raise the specter of voter registration fraud rarely evince much enthusiasm in such measures. As a result, I'm tempted to conclude that fears about voter registration fraud must either be typically based upon something other than ballot-stuffing, or else must be irrational.

Ballot stuffing has been rare in the US in recent times. Voter registration fraud is also relatively rare (measured as a fraction of the overall number of registered voter). I understand that people are concerned, but I wonder if this may be an instance of a broader theme: humans are often not very good at judging risks, and sometimes get scared out of proportion to low-probability events.

just:

Yes ACORN is completely innocent of any wrong doing at any level.

Nice job with the straw man, but I asked a specific question. I guess this is your way of telling me that the answer to my question is no.

By the way, I don't think the NY Post is a reputable source.