Just because Mitt Romney seems hell bent on torpedoing his chances in November doesn’t mean there aren’t people in the trenches willing to say and do almost anything to ensure he gets elected.
Today the New York Times reports that this is the one and only goal for True the Vote, a national hall monitor group focused solely on voter fraud. Yep, the voter fraud that experts have said time and again doesn’t really exist in any real sense of the phrase. However, the group’s leader, Catherine Engelbrecht, would have you believe that phantom mystery buses full of unregistered voters just pull up at polling stations across the country under false pretenses. This is not a joke. This is a tactic that Engelbrecht employs when she’s out leading True the Vote rallies. The only problem is no one can ever find a record of these buses full of ineligible voters.
“It’s so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate,” said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. “Pick your minority group,” he said.
Now, if it were just about one person’s crusade to call on election officials to look into all possible incidences of voter fraud, however few and far between, this would be one thing. But that’s not the goal of True the Vote. They see themselves as missionaries of voter righteousness or some other duty bound faction that requires the use of “on the ground forces” so to speak. They are mobilizing volunteers to in their view; stamp out the potential for voter fraud at the place where it lives — the polling station. The plan is to scrutinize the validity of voter registration rolls and voters who appear at the polls, the Times reports. In their sights are: noncitizens who are registered to vote, those without proper identification, others who may be registered twice, and dead people. Oh, yes, the dead people.
Those who believe voter fraud runs rampant in this country are looking for large numbers of voters disguised as dead people. This would be the Holy Grail find for Engelbrecht and her ilk — and if it’s the “minorities” pilfering the identities of the dead — all the better.
True the Vote is borne out of a Tea Party group called King Street Patriots Engelbrecht founded after the 2008 presidential elections where Engelbrecht, who claims to have been apolitical prior, indicates that she knew something was amiss after the election.
“Then in 2008, I don’t know, something clicked,” she said. “I saw our country headed in a direction that, for whatever reason – it didn’t hit me until 2008 – this really threatens the future of our children.”
This led her to work as a poll watcher in the 2009 local elections along with others in the King Street Patriots. After this assignment, she knew this was a cause she had to take on since she claimed there were so many shenanigans afoot. The tactics she and the King Street Patriots employed included investigating addresses that held upwards of six registered voters in low income or minority neighborhoods. One such supposed accusation of voter fraud by the group was dispelled by the Election Registrar in Houston where a building which held eight to ten registered voters was found to be torn down and the residents subsequently relocated; therefore it wasn’t an illegal den of wanton voter identity theft. Also in Houston, on the first day of early voting, in primarily minority neighborhoods, predominantly white poll watchers sent by King Street Patriots caused friction as they stood watch over the proceedings thusly reminding voters of the days when racial intimidation and attempts at voter suppression were commonplace — something the King Street Patriots organization and True the Vote deny. Yet, they haven’t dialed back their stance.
Other ways True the Vote’s internal methods and software has worked to single out those perceived to be ineligible.
- Not recognizing abbreviations — so if Mary Lee Smith signed her name Mary L. Smith she was deemed ineligible by the group
- Street abbreviations were also not recognized — Addresses like “Stevens Point” were flagged if “Pt.” was used
- Data was flagged if it lacked a ZIP code
True the Vote’s methods were found to be less accurate, complete, and reliable. This is not a surprising development given what seems to be blatant voter profiling and faulty approaches to fact-finding.
During a recall election in Wisconsin, the group managed to curtail voting at Lawrence University in Appleton where students attempted to register and vote on the same day. Election observers noted that True the Vote poll watchers were disruptive.
“They were making challenges of certain kinds and just kind of in physical contact with some of the poll workers, leaning over them, checking and looking,” said John Lepinski, a poll watcher and former Democratic Party chairman for Outagamie County.
The tactics resulted in slower lines which led some students to give up and leave. The Times reports that Ms. Engelbrecht said the True the Vote observer at Lawrence University believed that students were being permitted to register and vote without proper identification. Oh, yes, surely. Of course this is what the observer would say. Why else are they there if not to be disruptive to the process?
Ostensibly what Ms. Engelbrecht and her brand of do-gooders have encountered is not a huge spate of actual fraud, but more than one occasion of manufactured fraud on the part of her own voter fraud fortune hunters; from buses that appear and disappear full of supposed falsely registered voters, to intimidation tactics at the polls, and systemically flawed software that seeks to alienate numerous voters based on the smallest of myopic criteria that no real election entity will count as accurate. Add to that a whole bunch of ginned up hullaballoo about nothing and what do you have? You have a bunch of desperate people making mountains out of less than molehills, and then doubling down on their assertions as if the truth is too hard to come by. This is voter suppression. Endgame. There is no other way to describe it. And it has real effects on real, live, people. The Board of Elections, it would seem, are obligated to take these concerns seriously enough to indicate to a voter that their voting status has been challenged and that they must provide proof of their eligibility based upon what groups like True the Vote say.
This is wrong, and everyone should know how this group goes about alienating voters in minority neighborhoods across the country. And beyond that, how this group and others are working on ways to best challenge “questionable voters,” including 51,000 “nonexistent” people in just one county in Ohio, a most coveted swing state, who True the Vote’s volunteers say are registered to vote — and shouldn’t be.
Voters and the Board of Elections need to say to Catherine Engelbrecht, and others who follow her agenda, that we know the game, and we’re not playing. Known crackpot groups shouldn’t have this much power in challenging our rights.
