(credit: The Atlantic)
I sure hopes this issue gets addressed in The Union, Yubanet and KVMR during the upcoming elections. This would be an educational topic for George Rebane (and Barry Pruett and Russ Steele, for that matter) to discuss on their blogs. I’d also like to hear Paul Emery discuss it with Rebane (you known, the “entrepreneur” and “systems engineer”) on air. The Union’s new publisher also ought to educate himself as to the issue.
Here’s a report in Atlantic about “ballot cops.” A graphic is here. It’s a cautionary tale:
“Thirty years ago, the Republican National Committee was accused of violating the Voting Rights Act and ordered to cease its “ballot security” efforts. Now an organization called True the Vote wants to pick up where the RNC left off, by building a nationwide army to root out voter fraud—or, some would say, to suppress voter turnout,” the Atlantic is reporting.
“The afternoon before early voting began in the 2010 midterm elections, a crowd of people gathered in the offices of a Houston Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots. They soon formed a line that snaked out the door of the Patriots’ crumbling storefront and down the block, past the neighboring tattoo parlor.
“The volunteers, all of whom had been trained by the Patriots to work as poll watchers, had come to collect their polling-place assignments. As they waited, the group’s chief trainer, Alan Vera—a mustachioed former Army ranger who likens poll observers to commandos who “jump out of airplanes” and “blow things up”—walked the line, shaking hands. As he would later recall, he then launched into a drill-sergeant routine.
“Are you ready?”
“We’re ready!”
“Strength and honor! Remember your mission! Your mission is the vote!”
“The next day, King Street Patriots—many of them aging white suburbanites—poured into polling places in heavily black and Hispanic neighborhoods around Houston, looking for signs of voter fraud. Reports of problems at the polls soon began surfacing in the Harris County attorney’s office and on the local news. The focus of these reports was not fraud, however, but alleged voter intimidation. Among other things, poll observers were accused of hovering over voters, blocking lines of people who were trying to cast ballots, and, in the words of Assistant County Attorney Terry O’Rourke, “getting into election workers’ faces.”
The rest of the article is here.
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