True the Vote: Actions vs. Words

Just a little while ago HuffingtonPost reported on what “True the Vote,” the Teabaggers’ conspiracy to obstruct the democratic process at polling places from coast to coast, is actually trying to accomplish, and that is nothing more than what everyone has always suspected from the beginning: to put the skids on minority voters’ ability to vote.

 

Their public statements have always been that they are just making sure that the votes are fair and no polling place shenanigans are taking place. But now we have actions to match up against their words,  because as in the old saying, actions DO speak louder than words.

And what HuffingtonPost is reporting is that “True the Vote” is applying to post poll watchers at “primarily minority voting precincts on Election Day.”

"‘We've been concerned from the beginning that the efforts of True the Vote and aligned groups were going to be targeted largely in communities of color,’ said Eric Marshall, manager of legal mobilization for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. ‘We've seen in the past where these kinds of tactics can lead to intimidation and harassment of voters.’"

“A potentially even greater concern now is that the groups will use the voter challenge process ‘for the express purpose of creating lines and confusion,’ Marshall said”.

“Prohibitively long lines, particularly where Democrats are in the majority, are a net plus for Republicans; extraordinarily long lines for early voting in South Florida resulted from Republican Gov. Rick Scott's rollback of early voting days there”.

Closer to home, in Houston, a “True the Vote” poll watcher phoned in a complaint that individuals wearing clearly marked T-shirts indicating that they were volunteers for the NAACP were manipulating people standing in line at early vote locations.

Reported True the Vote poll watcher Eve Rockford:

“I started seeing them pulling people from different areas, and when I saw them moving people right through those e-slate machines to that front desk, I was like ‘there is something seriously wrong with this.’”

From KHOU:

Who was pulling voters? Rockford says it was three people wearing bright blue logo shirts of the NAACP, who she says “took over” the polling place.

And what were the scurrilous NAACP volunteers doing in their heinous actions? Identifying disabled people standing in line and moving them to the front. Disabled voters, you know, can’t stand around in line like those of us with our health. A disabled voter, faced with a long line, might just give up and go back to their rooms at the rest home.

So what this tea bagger wanted to do was to keep disabled people from voting. Disabled people might be a little defensive of their health care. Might be wary of a Republican scheme to privatize that which they have paid into all of their lives.

The Tea Party, in short, has devolved into a subspecies of humans that discriminate against minorities, the aged and the crippled. The next thing you know they’ll start decrying the federal bailout of New York in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.

Oh, wait, yeah, they’re already doing that, too.