The GOP's ACORN?

So last night I made a smart ass comment on facebook about the Iranian election have more votes than voters and asking what's the Farsi word for ACORN. A friend of mine responded with:

***Chris puts on flame proof suit*** I believe its "Mark Anthony Jacoby", although in some dialects it is "Young Political Majors (YPM)".

I had to look this up but apparently the GOP hired a firm named Young Political Majors that is now being investigated in several states for voter registration fraud.

Idiots!!!

As I understand it the way this worked is YPM was paid 7 to 12 dollars per Republican voter registered. To accomplish this YPM would allegedly dupe voters into switching their registration or would just steal a trick from the phone companies and switch them without telling the voter. The owner of the company also falsely registered at an address in order be able to collect signatures. (He pled guilty last Friday).

This makes a good case against paid signature gatherers (as do the ACORN cases) anytime you introduce the profit motive into something like this then people will try and make a profit.

I haven't quite decided how this compares to what ACORN does (registering non existent voters). In a way I think it is worse simply because of the duplicity involved but at the same time from what I have read no fake voters were registered and as far as I know it doesn't actually effect anyone's ability to vote for the candidate they want. In general though if we are going to complain about ACORN then we need to make sure our own hands are clean.

(The LA Times links to the allegation's and Jacoby's guilty plea are down at the moment. If I remember I will post them later)