Lisa Zhu | Getting past the blame game

Just last month, it seemed like you couldn't walk 10 feet without being asked if you were registered to vote by someone with a clipboard. I'm not talking about the student groups with tables and T-shirts on Locust Walk - I'm talking about the ACORN canvassers from the local community who blanketed the entire city. At best, they were an indicator of America's reawakened passion for civic engagement; at worst, they were just annoying. Who knew these innocent-seeming clipboard-carriers would be accused by Republican presidential candidate John McCain "of perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history?"

Let's pause for a moment. The non-profit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now registered 1.3 million voters nationally. But according to a New York Times article from Oct. 23, 2008, 400,000 of those forms were rejected for being duplicates, incomplete or inaccurate. Certainly, a 30-percent defect rate for voter registration applications is a terrible thing, but it's by no means a cleverly orchestrated coup on democracy. After all, does anyone with an ounce of common sense really believe that submitting a voter registration form for "Mickey Mouse" or "Jimmy Johns" will escape notice once, let alone 13,000 times? If this were a vast, left-wing conspiracy to fabricate votes, surely they would have tried to be a little more discreet with their tactics.

In other words, these cases of voter-registration fraud are not the product of a carefully plotted strategy from ACORN's management team to steal the election from the Republicans. Instead, falsified registration applications were largely caused by ACORN's hiring and compensation scheme for its canvassers (1,100 in Pennsylvania alone), many of whom come from low-income backgrounds.

"There are a lot of homeless people, recovering alcoholics, recovering drug addicts" working as canvassers, according to the Philadelphia Deputy Commissioner of Elections Fred Voigt.

"These are people who are desperate for money." As a result, ACORN winds up compelling underperforming employees to falsify information when they set quotas for the number of registrants canvassers must sign up.

These conditions apply to any hiring establishment. "If I were running a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart, and I had to hire 1,100 employees, I would also probably end up hiring some people that wouldn't be there for the right reasons, and they would take advantage of the organization or the company," said ACORN Pennsylvania political director Krista Holub. However, the difference is that when employees mess up at Wal-Mart, they get fired. When employees mess up voter registration, ACORN as a whole gets stripped down by election officials and the news media.

It's unfortunate that this issue has boiled down to angry Republicans versus defensive ACORN officials. "This thing has become a political football," Voigt said. "The whole issue has become too politically driven too close to the election day." On the one hand, Republicans have exaggerated the impact of a handful of fraudulent voter registration forms (most of which have already been flagged by election officials).

On the other hand, ACORN is also to blame for making counteraccusations against conservatives instead of accepting responsibility for the mistakes of its own employees. Both sides are so busy accusing each other of fraud or bias that no one is addressing the fundamental cause of the issue.

We should be looking at the bigger picture, examining what factors led to this mess. We can all agree that paying canvassers to get registration forms does not work. But many of these canvassers cannot find other methods of employment, given their limited human capital.

Consequently, getting rid of the practice without finding a solution could cripple ACORN's efforts to reduce political apathy in blighted neighborhoods and provide disadvantaged individuals with jobs.

In the end, these are complicated social problems with no easy answers. But we can't hope to address them adequately until both sides stop attacking each other and start working together to craft thoughtful and inclusive policies.

Lisa Zhu is a Wharton and College senior from Cherry Hill, N.J., and United Minorities Council chairwoman. Her e-mail is zhu@dailypennsylvanian.com. Zhu-ology appears every Thursday.

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