'Tea Party' Groups Attempting to Purge Voting Rolls in Ohio
Here we go again with more dirty tricks from Republicans trying to steal another presidential election -- Tea party groups work to remove names from Ohio voter rolls:
Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old Democrat who lives in central Ohio, was startled a few weeks ago to open a letter that said a stranger was challenging her right to vote in the presidential election.
Monroe, who was recovering from cancer surgery, called the local election board to protest. A local tea party leader was trying to strike Monroe from the voter rolls for a reason that made no sense: Her apartment building in Lancaster was listed as a commercial property.
"I'm like, really? Seriously?" Monroe said. "I've lived here seven years, and now I'm getting challenged?"
Monroe's is one of at least 2,100 names that tea party groups have sought to remove from Ohio's voter rosters.
The groups and their allies describe it as a citizen movement to prevent ballot fraud, although the Republican secretary of state said in an interview that he knew of no evidence that any more than a handful of illegal votes had been cast in Ohio in the last few presidential elections.
"We're all about election integrity — making sure everyone who votes is registered and qualified voters," said Mary Siegel, one of the leaders of the Ohio effort.
Some Democrats see it as a targeted vote-suppression drive. The names selected for purging include hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. [...]
The tea party groups, scattered around the state, have joined forces under the banner of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project. It is an offshoot of True the Vote, a Texas organization that has recruited volunteers nationwide to challenge voter rosters and work as poll watchers.
True the Vote was founded by Catherine and Bryan Engelbrecht, a couple who run an oil field equipment manufacturing firm in Rosenberg, Texas.
In Ohio, election records show, one of the project's top priorities has been to remove college students from the voter rolls for failure to specify dorm room numbers. (As a group, college students are strongly in Obama's camp.)
Voters challenged include 284 students at the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, 110 at Oberlin College, 88 at College of Wooster, 38 at Kent State — and dozens more from the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Lake Erie College, Walsh University, Hiram College, John Carroll University and Telshe Yeshiva, a rabbinical college near Cleveland.
So far, every county election board that has reviewed the dorm challenges found them invalid.
Here's more from ProPublica on True the Vote -- A Reading Guide to True the Vote, the Controversial Voter Fraud Watchdog.
