Houston based "True the Vote", a fake "anti-voter fraud" group run by Catherine Engelbrecht, the head of a Texas-based Tea Party Organization that has publicly declared its opposition to President Obama, and has taken it upon themselves to "protect" the country from the nonexistent scourge of "voter fraud", was caught sending letters to minority voters in Ohio challenging their right to vote.
ABC News' Dan Harris investigated recent claims of "voter harassment" among poor blacks in Ohio by the Tea Party-backed group, speaking to Teressa Sharp, a low-income African-American grandmother that says she has voted in every election since she was 18, yet received a letter in the mail from TTV saying her "right to vote has been challenged by a qualified electorate" (FYI: an "electorate" is a population, not a person). The justification for this challenge? The report never says.
When Harris tells Engelbrecht that cases of "Voter Fraud" are more rare than prosecutions of "migratory bird violations" and "virtually nonexistent", Engelbrecht responds that that means "there's room for improvement."
Actual cases of "in-person voter fraud" in Ohio is 0.00004% [ibid]. That means that for every four people that these groups might actually stop from voting illegally, TEN MILLION "legal" voters are potentially disenfranchised. The very idea that stopping ONE person from fraudulently voting... which would have NO discernible effect on the outcome of an election, justifies potentially disenfranchising 2,500,000 legitimate voters... which WOULD unquestionably have a catastrophic impact on our elections... is an absolute farce, and should be prosecuted proportionately.
Racist far-right partisan Republicans think they have found a cloak of respectability in challenging the rights of the poor and minorities, who typically vote Democratic, on the grounds of "protecting our elections from voter fraud". What justification is there to believe the poor and minorities are any more likely to commit "voter fraud" than rich white suburbanites that typically vote Republican? None. Yet for some odd coinky-dink, those just always seems to be groups they focus on.
