Catherine Engelbrecht, center, leader of True The Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud, in Worthington, Ohio, Aug. 25, 2012. Busloads of illegal voters, cited by voter fraud groups like True The Vote, have yet to be seen. (Handout photo)
By Dan Freedman and Joe Holley
Civil rights lawyers on Tuesday said the national poll-watching effort of Houston-based True the Vote had fizzled even as the organization’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said it was still responding to a deluge of complaints.
Engelbrecht had predicted the group and its affiliates would field a million poll watchers to ferret out what Engelbrecht described as a tidal wave of voter fraud that could alter election results in key states.
But her opponents charged the group was little more than a thinly veiled effort by conservatives to intimidate voters, many of them minorities, and depress the vote for Democratic candidates.
In that regard, civil rights lawyers said, their efforts failed.
“I think voter determination is so strong out there that (TTV hasn’t) had the impact they desired,’’ said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, one of several organizations. It’s good for our nation to know we don’t allow an un-hooded Klan in 2012.’’
In a statement, Engelbrecht responded: “Arnwine and company should join True the Vote in the 21st Century _ they’d certainly save money. In the meantime, they’re punching in the dark.’’
The Lawyers’ Committee and other civil rights groups joining in an umbrella organization, the Election Protection Coalition, recorded over 70,000 complaints to its emergency number of long lines, voters finding their names inexplicably stripped from rolls at their usual polling places, and poll workers asking voters for IDs even though judges had ruled they weren’t necessary to vote.
But complaints concerning True the Vote were relatively few, officials of the coalition said.
Eric Marshall, also with the Lawyers’ Committee, said perhaps True the Vote “wasn’t as strong as it claimed to be. They haven’t had the effect that many thought they’d have on this election.’’
Engelbrecht, however, insisted in a statement that True the Vote had been inundated with calls to its Election Integrity Hotline. The group spent Tuesday “sifting through hundreds of logged complaints from poll watchers and concerned citizens that will require exhaustive due diligence prior to referring to authorities.’’
She described the polling place irregularities reported by watchers as ranging from “the mundane procedural hiccups to clear violations of various federal election laws.”
True the Vote is “exercising as much caution as possible before submitting complaints to election officials off the hotline,” said spokesman Logan Churchwell.
Churchwell praised Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart for his “quick action” after a True the Vote volunteer accused members of the NAACP of taking over a Houston polling place last week and electioneering on behalf of President Obama.
Stanart promised to investigate allegations of trespassing beyond marked boundaries at the polls.
The dispute began when Eve Rockford, a True the Vote-trained poll watcher, accused the NAACP of taking over the Harris County Precinct 139 polling location at 6719 W. Montgomery Road in the Acres Homes community.
In a written statement, Rockford said that NAACP officials handed out bottled water to early voters standing in line, hand-picked people to move to the front of the line and were “stirring up the crowd” to vote for Obama.
NAACP officials said they did not break any laws by assisting elderly and disabled voters “by standing in line for them or asking younger people to let the elderly and disabled go ahead of them in the line to vote,” according to a statement released by the NAACP.
Churchwell said the group had not experienced any “direct problems with NAACP today.”
Elsewhere, Tea Party advocates affiliated with True the Vote in Columbus, Ohio, were accused of fraudulently using signatures of candidates in applications to local election officials to have themselves certified as poll watchers.
One judicial candidate, Terri Jamison, said in a letter to Franklin County, Ohio, election officials that posted on a political website, plunderbund.com, that the True the Vote activists had described themselves to her as a “bi-partisan group’’ that wanted to “observe the vote count.’’
Jamison said that had she “known the real intentions of this group, there is no way that I would have signed to give True the Vote permission to be a vote observer.’’
The Franklin County Board of Elections barred True the Vote’s representatives from poll watching in Columbus, capital of a key battleground state.
Engelbrecht accused the Ohio Democratic Party of pressuring election officials and candidates into rejecting True the Vote poll watchers. She hinted at legal action.
“The Ohio Democratic Party has projected paranoia on an international scale by promoting the idea that concerned citizens would dare observe elections to ensure a fair process,’’ Engelbrecht said in a statement. “If the Ohio Democratic Party thinks True the Vote-trained poll watchers are legion, wait until it meets our lawyers.’’