They aren’t even trying to hide it, which is a form of voter intimidation in itself. If they can pass laws allowing what are essentially vigilante wingnuts to have free rein, they may very well be able to keep some people from even trying to vote:
In a leaked video of a recent presentation, a man who identifies himself as a GOP official in Harris County, Tex., says the party needs 10,000 Republicans for an “election integrity brigade” in Houston.
Then he pulls up a map of the area’s voting precincts and points to Houston’s dense, racially diverse urban core, saying the party specifically needed volunteers with “the confidence and courage to come down here,” adding, “this is where the fraud is occurring.”
The official cites widespread vote fraud, which has not been documented in Texas, as driving the need for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voters at every precinct in the county.
Now the government accountability group Common Cause Texas — which published the footage Thursday — is raising the alarm that such an effort could instead serve to intimidate and suppress voters in metro Houston.
“It’s very clear that we’re talking about recruiting people from the predominantly Anglo parts of town to go to Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Anthony Gutierrez, the group’s executive director, told The Washington Post.
“This is a role that’s supposed to do nothing but stand at a poll site and observe,” he added. So “why is he suggesting someone needs to be ‘courageous’?” Gutierrez asked.
In a statement to The Post, the Harris County Republican Party said Common Cause was “blatantly mischaracterizing a grassroots election worker recruitment video.” The party chair, Cindy Siegel, accused the group of trying “to bully and intimidate Republicans.”
“The goal is to activate an army of volunteers for every precinct in Harris County,” Siegel said. “And to engage voters for the whole ballot, top to bottom, and ensure every legal vote is counted.”
The video, recorded in early March, comes as the Texas Legislature considers a set of voting changes that would expand the role of poll watchers and limit other election officials’ ability to oversee those volunteers.
Republicans have proposed a raft of such legislation in dozens of statehouses across the country, insisting they are necessary to shore up confidence in voting systems. But nationwide, as in Texas, critics say these voting bills would only tighten access to the ballot box, particularly for voters of color and other marginalized groups.
This is an old tactic. The Republicans ran a similar program nationally back in the 1960s.
It it was the presidential election of 1964 that marked the first national effort at partisan vote suppression. It was called Operation Eagle Eye. The approach was simple: to challenge voters, especially voters of color, at the polls throughout the country on a variety of specious pretexts. If the challenge did not work outright—that is, if the voter was not prevented from casting a ballot (provisional ballots were not in widespread use at this time)—the challenge would still slow down the voting process, create long lines at the polls, and likely discourage some voters who could not wait or did not want to go through the hassle they were seeing other voters endure.
A Republican memo, obtained by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 1964, outlined plans for challenging voters at the polls and described the tactics as including encouraging stalling on lines in Democratic districts, equipping poll watchers with cameras to “frighten off . . . Democratic wrong-doers,” enlisting the help of local police sympathetic to the Goldwater campaign, and charging that ineligible Democratic voters were on the registration rolls.
Almost 60 years after the civil rights movement, they are still at it.