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The Hardy Boys in: The Mystery of the ACORN Conspiracy!

Ever since McCain openly questioned ACORN in the presidential debates last year, ACORN has been the subject of a lot of hand-wringing and conspiracy theory.  Allegations that they committed massive voter fraud the likes of which we haven't seen before, or that they will even take control of the census (despite only being one of many organizations being paid to help distribute and collect census information) have run rampant.

Now, believe it or not, I'm going to criticize ACORN in this piece.  Really.  However, I think that the criticism that should rightly be aimed at them isn't the criticism they are being given.  Where the angry right looks at last year's scandals and sees conspiracy, I look at ACORN and see something far more everyday: incompetence.

First, some background: I've worked with a number of political organizations in both paid and unpaid positions that do similar things to ACORN, at least in regards to election activities.  By that I mean that I have knocked on doors, circulated petitions, registered people to vote, and even raised money.  At FieldWorks, one of the more effective organizations I've seen, I drove petitioners to their locations and saw quite a bit of the workings of such an operation.  Furthermore, my sister actually did work for ACORN for a brief period of time - her experience was bad enough that she quit very quickly.

While I consider myself to be pretty good at what I've done at those organizations - at FieldWorks I was one of the top petitioners, and one of the most consistent - it is hard work.  Shockingly hard work.  See, the way these organizations, including ACORN, typically work is that they pay their employees based on how many petition signatures they collect, how many voter registrations they complete, or how much money they raise, depending on the exact task of the employees and the goal of the organization.  Some of the shadier organizations - typically the ones that are just hired guns and don't care what the cause is, and which often hire more shady people and drug addicts - will actually pay by the signature, e.g. 25 cents per signature collected.  The problem with this, as you can probably imagine, is that it encourages fraud; while the organizations don't necessarily advocate such fraud on purpose, the reality is that many employees will fabricate a number of signatures themselves in order to get a better salary that day.  More legitimate organizations, such as FieldWorks and, again, ACORN, will typically operate on a different model: they pay employees by the hour, but the scale of pay will be based again on the number of signatured attained or the amount of money raised.  For instance, a FieldWorks office might pay their employees 8 dollars per hour at the minimum, but require that they get 80 signatures a day in order to keep their job there; a failure to do so for too long may result in termination.  On the plus side for the employees, a scale will typically be built in that encourages them to achieve more for better pay: say, 90 signatures a day earns them 12 dollars per hour, 100 singatures earns them 14 per hour, etc.  Usually, there will also be a grace period of a few days so that the canvassers can learn what they're doing before they're expected to meet the minimums, but this doesn't last long and many won't pass through it. 

Now, no doubt this still encourages some attempts at employee fraud, but the better-organized and more effective these organizations are, the better and more diligent they are at monitoring for such fraud: often they will have a whole department that combs through signatures line by line to make sure employees aren't falsifying any of them.  Furthermore, since this pay is usually based on the averages over a week or so as opposed to day-to-day, and certainly not signature-to-signature, there is somewhat less material reason for employees to cheat; whereas at some organizations a few falsified signatures can give them a few extra dollars that day, at the better organizations they risk being fired for falsifying them, and furthermore would only be slightly increasing their weekly average or perhaps helping themselves keep a job they likely hate anyway for an extra day.

The paradox here is that the less an employee cares about the actual cause (whether it's to elect a politician, save the whales, or anything else), the more likely they are to try and commit fraud on their employer.  In other words, someone who genuinely cares about electing Barack Obama or getting an initiative on the ballot generally won't try to pull anything, because they know that their forgery will likely be caught in the long term and won't help the cause, even if they get paid.  Someone who is there merely because it is "a job," however, is more likely to try something because they only care about the money anyway; if a little forgery helps them pay their rent that month, so be it.  Even the better organizations, provided they pay their canvassers, face this dichotomy; about half the people will be there because they want to change the world, and the other half will be there only because they saw a flier somewhere and need the money.  With some exceptions, the latter tend to be poorer at the job, whether they commit fraud or not, and typically get the boot quickly.

On top of this, even the best and most honest canvassers will run into a recurring problem: people are jerks.  As a canvasser, you get people yelling at you, filling out half of a form and then abruptly leaving, and even filling them out completely with obviously false information just to mess with you.  Sometimes, it's ambiguous: I once got a signature from a person named "Beatrice Boop," and at the office my bosses and I looked it over for a while trying to figure out if it had been a joke or if the person really had the unfortunate luck to be named closely to a cartoon character.  As well, whether well meaning or not, many people will stop to listen and even debate with you despite not being eligible to sign or vote; at ACORN, my sister once got stuck talking to a homeless man for quite some time who turned out to not even be eligible to register, but whom nonetheless wouldn't leave her alone. 

Some organizations handle these obstacles better than others.  None of them can be perfect at it.  ACORN, as it turns out, was far from perfect last year; on the contrary, they widely dropped the ball.  In my sister's stint there, she found her chapter to be one of the most disorganized organizations she had ever worked with.  She was dropped at her location - a supermarket - on her first day with virtually no training and no guidance, and expected to try and meet her minimum requirements of registrations for that day.  There were virtually no people at the supermarket in question that day, and there was no way for her to meet her required goal and pass the initial training period.  Furthermore, her supervisor, whom had dropped her off (at any organization canvassers work mostly independently, but the better ones will at least train them for a little while their first day to show them the ropes), was too busy and overwhelmed to help her or even stay for a short while to show her any techniques or skills.  Thankfully, my sister is an honest person, but it is easy to see how, in such circumstances (which are quite common in canvassing), many would resort to forging some signatures to try and keep their job a little longer.  For my sister's part, she found her supervisors so unhelpful, and her experience so awful, that she quit very shortly after that by electing to just stop showing up at all, and she has spoken ill of ACORN ever since.

ACORN's real failure of responsibility is thus as such: by failing to create realistic goals for its employees, carefully monitor their activities, track for forged registrations and those filled out by pranksters, or create a more cohesive organization and strategy in general, they inadvertently created a situation in which more employees were able to commit fraud individually than normal.  The vast majority, if not all of, of this fraud was discovered and the false registrations thrown out - they aren't difficult at all for the offices to find - but ACORN's incompetence allowed a lot more false registrations than usual to go into the offices in the first place, thus sparking controversy.  They are required by law to hand over even the false ones to the registration offices, but they hadn't done good enough of a job of finding them and warning the offices ahead of time, or identifying the employees at fault and terminating them.  Just as any McDonald's restaurant will have some employees that steal food and spit in customers' burgers, any canvassing organization will have employees that try and pull a fast one on them and get away with not completing their work; the difference is that the better organization, or the better McDonald's manager for that matter, will work to identify these employees faster and punish them, and the worse-organized of them will submit more faulty signatures or sell more spit-tainted hamburgers.

Conservatives who criticize ACORN often believe that they have found a real-life illuminati, proof somehow of a larger leftist conspiracy.  The reality is that what they've found is really a lot closer to the Keystone Cops or the Three Stooges; potentially well-meaning but nonetheless incompetent (at least as last year's election activities go) people that failed at what they were set out to do.  While I can't claim to know the inner-workings of the Obama campaign, it wasn't of any surprise to me, in retrospect, that the campaign had stopped working with ACORN after the primaries; I have little doubt they found that ACORN's work and organization last year wasn't up to snuff, and a waste of their money.