In 2004 I worked for ACORN as an organizer responsible for boosting voter registration in Pennsylvania’s Delaware and Montgomery Counties. I also did some work in Philadelphia Co. Here’s how it worked. We were prohibited by law from doing partisan registration. We couldn’t say one party was better than another or encourage voters to register as Democrats. So, what I did was look at past elections and identify precincts where the Dems received at least 65%-70% of the vote. That way, if we registered 10 voters we could expect/hope that seven of them would vote Democratic and only three of them would vote Republican. In other words, we aimed to gain 4 votes for every 10 people we registered. As it turned out, all the districts that voted 65% for Democrats were predominantly African-American.
For that reason, I hired almost exclusively African-American people to do my voter registration. My pool of employees were drawn from the North Philly ghettoes and many of them had never been to the suburbs before. Almost none of them had a driver’s license or a car, and frequently their only photo ID was from school.
I would hire them for about $7 an hour, train them in the ‘rap’, or things to say to entice people to register to vote, go out with them for a few hours and knock doors or work a bus station, and then they would be on their own. Each day they would get a precinct map highlighted to tell them which houses to hit. They might hit those houses or they might go sit in a pizzeria for a few hours and do nothing. The only way I had to judge their performance was by how many registrations they brought back. If they consistently brought back less than 10 per shift, they got fired. Sometimes we would retrain them and give them a second chance. In any event, these were overwhelmingly poor people. People that needed that check to keep the lights turned on. For those that were either lazy or just not any good at registering voters, there was a powerful motive to commit fraud by filling out fake registration forms or getting people to re-register ‘to do them a favor’.
An annoyingly large part of my job involved inspecting forms for signs of fraud, and even calling phone numbers to verify that they had, in fact, registered. In spite of this, inevitably, some fraudulent forms got through and were submitted to the board of elections where, undoubtedly, they were a major nuisance.
Today I see that four Kansas City ACORN workers have been arrested for submitting fraudulent forms. I don’t know the details. I do note that ACORN is not upset that they have been arrested. It appears they were defrauding ACORN. We had some of that in 2004, too. I still find it chilling that the Republicans are going after these people because depending on details, it could have been me.
And I never knowingly turned in a fraudulent card. I never threw out a Republican registration, as much as they annoyed me. I played by the rules to the best of my ability, and now it seems I could go to jail for doing that job.
On another note, the reason the Republicans keep pushing photo ID’s as a voter verification device is not because there is an epidemic of people voting under a false name. It’s because so few young blacks in urban areas have a photo ID. The fact is, they don’t need them. If you don’t drive and are too young to go to bars, there is no reason to go to the DMV and get a photo ID. It just presents one more obstacle to voting. It’s a hassle, just like 3,4,5 hour lines are a hassle.
It’s nothing but glorified voter suppression.
