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Yes, the same kind of people who got themselves worked into an angry froth about two members of the New Black Panther Party standing in front of a polling place in Philadelphia have decided to show the Dems how it’s really done — with Tea Party thuggery!
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, has launched an investigation into the Texas-based polling place-watching organization True the Vote, which he says is involved in what is “clearly a case of voter suppression.”
Speaking Monday evening on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation,” with host Rev. Al Sharpton, Cummings said that the investigation will be looking into what sort of information True the Vote was using to challenge the legality of certain voters, and whether or not those challenges fell on specific geographical areas.
“It would be interesting to see whether those are in suburban areas, are they in urban areas? We would suggest that most of them are in urban areas,” Cummings said. “They have made it their business to claim that they are trying to keep the voting process legitimate when in fact they’re suppressing the vote.” True the Vote’s president, Catherine Engelbrecht, has already agreed to provide documentation and testimony, Cummings said.
True the Vote has responded already to Rep. Cummings’ on its website with a statement and open letter, calling his allegations “factually bankrupt.” Engelbrecht offered to meet with Cummings in his Washington, D.C. office in order to “brief [Rep. Cummings and his] staff about our program and help dispel any misconceptions you may have.”
It could be worse than you think. The pretextual “hunt for voter fraud” goes beyond registration purging and poll watchers. In states where poll watchers are more heavily regulated, True the Vote and their affiliates/allies are recruiting and training people to be actual election judges. One organizer went so far as to say “Being an election judge is even better than being a poll watcher as you are actually running the election.”
So do you think that driver’s license makes your vote safe?
Any liquor store clerk knows how easy it is to get a fake. Do we expect TTV not to be aware of this fact in their training? Does the state provide adequate guidance for election judges in determining whether an ID’s picture sufficiently matches the person staning before them? What about the signature matching requirements?
These subjective judgment calls concerning a person’s right to vote a regular ballot may end up in the hands of someone trained to be paranoid rather than reasonably vigilant. See http://www.ragingwisdom.com/who-watches-the-poll-watchers-part-ii/ for some of the flaws in Ohio’s laws protecting voters on election day, and here
http://www.ragingwisdom.com/who-watches-the-poll-watchers-part-iii/ for Florida which has a horrific defect in its voter challenge law that is not getting enough attention.