Me no understand big numbers
In his latest defense of ACORN’s absurd system of registering people who don’t exist/don’t want to register to vote, Matt suggests that the numbers are too big for the puny intellect of conservative critics to comprehend:
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.
You know what? That’s a fair point. A fair point that’s totally irrelevant to the topic discussed so far. As a reminder, this is the quote I used the other day:
Of the more than 40,000 documents received from ACORN, about 10,000 have been duplicates and many have come back with invalid addresses. Of the remaining documents “I do believe fictitious ones are registered,” said Williams “We don’t cross check this. That’s supposed to be done on a state-wide database. So if that isn’t done, we don’t have the resources to do it.”
Now, my math isn’t the best, but that appears to be a failure rate of right around 25%. Today I saw this story, via The Weekly Standard:
Then there’s Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. “All the signatures looked exactly the same,” said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn’s registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.
This is an error rate of 40%. 40%! If the FDA allowed a drug that failed 40% of the time to get into general circulation, people would wind up in jail.
Again: my point is not that ACORN, as an organization, is engaged in massive voter fraud designed to allow evil minorities to vote repeatedly in order to get their crypto-Muslim candidate into office. My point is that when conservatives scrutinize forms submitted by ACORN and try to get false/fraudulently submitted names off of the voter rolls, they aren’t doing so because they’re evil reactionaries engaged in massive voter suppression designed to keep the Christ-like Obama out of office. They’re doing so to maintain the integrity of the democratic process. I wish people like Matt (and Ezra and the rest) would recognize that fact instead of assuming (and arguing) that they’re evil SOBs who hate black people.