Has Voter Intimidation Already Begun?

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_monk/2950533214/" target="new">e-monk</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


When Republicans decided to team up with the tea party to resurrect their crusade against voter fraud, voting rights advocates worried that the GOP would end up intimidating eligible voters. Though the election is still two weeks away, reports of voter intimidation have already begun to surface during the early voting that’s begun this week in many states. In the Houston area, the Harris County Attorney is investigating 14 complaints that early voters from predominantly minority areas were intimidated at the polls. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is interviewing witnesses about the alleged voter intimidation, TPM Muckracker reports. According to the Houston Chronicle:

The complaints included poll watchers “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots…

Kevin Mauzy, chief deputy county clerk, said more poll watchers than usual showed up during the first day of early voting, and their numbers may have made some voters uneasy…Janie Reyes, who voted in Moody Park, said she witnessed poll watchers carrying on conversations with voters and clerks. “As I understand it, they’re not supposed to be talking,” she said.

Tensions around voter integrity are riding high in Harris County, where a nonprofit linked with a local tea party group, the King Street Patriots, accused voting rights organization Houston Votes of illegally registering 17,000 new voters. (Houston Votes admitted there was a small handful of incorrectly registered voters, but denies perpetrating massive fraud.) The most populated part of Texas, Harris County is also a key base of support for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White, the former mayor of Houston who’s locked in a tight race against incumbent Rick Perry.

The Texas Democratic Party has suggested that the King Street Patriots are responsible for the overzealous poll watchers. The tea partiers deny that they’re organizing such a push. But other tea party groups in Texas and elsewhere are certainly moving ahead with efforts to recruit poll watchers and workers, hyping up fears that the phantom menace of ACORN, labor unions, and other Democratically allied groups will try to steal the election.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Texas, the Dallas Tea Party claims that activists themselves are being discriminated against at the polls. One of the group’s coordinators, Katrina Pierson, says a tea partier in Garland, Texas was asked to remove her Gasden (Don’t Tread on Me) button before being allowed to vote, and that a similar incident happened to another voter wearing a Waco Tea Party t-shirt. Although campaign paraphenilia is prohibited in polling stations, the “Tea Party anything is non-partisan and does not represent a candidate,” says Pierson, adding that the group was investigating the claims further to see if legal action was warranted. (According to the Texas Secretary of State, tea party apparel is “included in the definition” of prohibited campaign paraphenilia, says Sarah Duncan, campaign administrator for the Dallas County Democratic Party. She adds that there have been “rumors” of voter intimidation in the area, but “nothing on the scale of the stuff in Houston.”)

Nevertheless, the allegations have riled up the Texas tea partiers about shenanigans at the polls. “Maybe we could have gotten in if we had worn Black Panther T-shirts and carried Billy clubs,” says Phillip Dennis, another Dallas Tea Party leader.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate