Kelly Shackleford is president of Liberty Institute, which
represents King Street Patriots and its True the Vote Initiative.
He says they stick by the alleged voter registration fraud it uncovered
and presented to Vasquez.
Kelly Shackleford is president of Liberty Institute, which
represents King Street Patriots and its True the Vote Initiative.
He says they stick by the alleged voter registration fraud it uncovered
and presented to Vasquez.
snip.........
The complaints, he said, came from Kashmere Gardens, Moody Park, Sunnyside and other predominantly minority neighborhoods. 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.
"Keep in mind these are allegations of voter intimidation," O'Rourke said. "It's sometimes in the eye of the beholder."....
"Poll watchers are as important in free elections as anything, and we are committed to allowing them to do their job, but they're very limited in what they can do," said Hector DeLeon, a spokesman for the Harris County clerk's office.
Any time the county clerk's office receives a call, DeLeon said, someone from the office calls the presiding judge at the precinct in question, discusses the allegations and reviews poll watcher guidelines. "We take every call seriously," he said.
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. "They're entitled to watch the process," he said.
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Harris County warns parties to watch the poll-watchers
Responding to complaints that poll watchers were intimidating voters in predominantly minority polling locations, County Attorney Vince Ryan summoned the county chairmen of both major parties to his office Tuesday and reminded them of their responsibility to make sure the observers were obeying the law.
Ryan also announced in the meeting that he has requested a monitor from the Justice Department to observe the voting process in Harris County through Nov. 2.
In a follow-up letter to the county chairmen, Ryan pointed out that poll watchers are entitled to be at a polling location, but cannot be present at the actual polling station when the voter is preparing his ballot and cannot converse with an election officer about the election, except to call attention to an irregularity or violation of the law........
Birnberg placed the blame on some 300 poll watchers trained by a group of tea party activists who call themselves the King Street Patriots.
Poll watchers must be affiliated with either a party or a candidate, although the King Street Patriots group, through a project called True the Vote, is recruiting poll watchers on its website for Election Day, Nov. 2.
Hiram Sasser, an attorney for the King Street Patriots, denied that any of the hundreds of poll workers the organization has trained were instructed to run afoul of election laws or intimidate voters.
end snips