McMahon Campaign Cancels Money-For-GOP Registrations Voter Drive

[Ian David]

The Senate campaign of Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO and current candidate for the Republican nomination in Connecticut, has backed off from a controversial voter-registration plan that would have provided bonuses for every Republican voter registration.

The Stamford Advocate reported on the plan Friday, comparing it to the voter-registration fraud scandal that ensnared ACORN when paid canvassers were found to have filled in forms with names like "Mickey Mouse" -- acts that did not lead to actual voter fraud, since there is no evidence that "Mickey Mouse" showed up to vote. The McMahon campaign was going to pay college students $10 per hour to sign up voters -- with a $5 bonus for each Republican registration. Connecticut has a closed primary system, in which only registered Republicans and Democrats can vote in their respective primaries.

McMahon spokesman Ed Patru told TPMDC that the bonus structure was cancelled late Friday or early Saturday, shortly after the newspaper article was published. "I'll say that it's important to Linda that everything this campaign does be above board and legal," said Patru. "While this voter registration plan for university campuses was 100 percent in compliance with the law, we want to be sensitive to perceptions as well. Because of that, the bonus structure was dropped."

I asked Patru if the campaign had any concerns or safeguards when this plan was first laid out, about the potential moral hazards involved in the pay structure -- the sort of things that Republicans attacked ACORN for in 2008. For example, signature-gatherers would have incentives to create fake registrations, to falsely check off the Republican box on a registration form that had left the party field blank, or to even throw out Democratic and non-Republican registrations.


Former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon (R-CT)

More:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/mcmahon-campaign-cancels-money-for-gop-registrations-voter-drive.php

[gratuitous]

1. TPM is usually more careful

ACORN was never "ensnared" in a voter registration fraud scandal, and TPM should know that. ACORN, as part of its community organizing, registered voters, taught them their rights and encouraged them to vote. Because they operated in poor areas, most of the people they contacted tended to vote in their own interests and against the status quo. Republican operatives, noticing the success ACORN was having in making changes, thought voter registration was a good idea, except for one little thing: Democrats registered along with the hoped-for new Republican voters.

Well, being Republicans, it didn't take them long to hit on a new way to deal with this: They simply "lost" or "shit-canned" Democratic registration cards and never sent them along to the local county registrar. People who thought they were registered found out come election day that they hadn't. It was such an egregious problem that Congress got involved. From now on, if you had a voter registration drive, you had to turn in all the cards that were filled out. You couldn't go through them and discard the ones that displeased you.

Did that daunt our plucky Republican friends? It did not. They began attending ACORN registration drives in earnest, filling out bogus cards with fictitious names like Mickey Mouse. Then, they cynically turned right around to allege that ACORN was fraudulently registering voters, even though ACORN (as they were bound to do by law, a law enacted to correct Republican shenanigans) turned in every last card, and helpfully flagged the suspicious-looking ones for the local registrar ("No, there probably isn't a guy named Popeye T. Sailor at 123 Spinach Lane").

So, while Republicans were relentless in their attacks on ACORN, finally destroying it, none of their charges ever panned out.