In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.
“If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal. It just means they’re suspicious.”
Womack is the president and founder of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group of self-described patriots dedicated to investigating the election for what they perceive as incidents of fraud in the pivotal presidential battleground state — where polls put the contest at a statistical tie between the Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Womack describes his organization as comprised mostly of retirees working remotely from their computers to analyze public records related to voting. He says the group has a list of multiple factors they are using to flag suspicious voters, a task he believes is necessary because of flaws in how voter information has been collected in recent years. […]
Juan Proaño, the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told CBS News it defies logic to expect undocumented immigrants would take the risk of crossing the border and then place themselves in legal jeopardy by registering to vote and actually voting in an election.
“It’s very much a myth,” said Proaño,” but the campaigns have essentially used it as rhetoric, again, to try and suppress and intimidate the Latino vote.”
It’s absurd. The last thing an undocumnted migrant wants to do is get involved in some highly regulated American legal ritual. Fergawdsakes.
But this is really about intimidating Hispanic voters because they have traditionally been a Democratic constitutency. With all the talk ab out Trump making huge headway with that group you’d think thay’d contemplate whether this is so smart but then these are Republicans we’re talking about.
I keep hearing that there are Democratic lawyers in place in all the battlegrounds to defend the vote. I hope that’s true because the Republican yahoos have been trained to challenge anyone they see as “an enemy within” whether it’s Latinos. Black voters, college students whatever. We’re already seeing signs of it:
A junior at Franklin & Marshall College was wrongfully turned away from the Lancaster County elections office on Tuesday, told he was ineligible to vote in Pennsylvania unless he could prove he was not registered in his home state, Connecticut.
The student was already a registered voter in Pennsylvania and had voted by mail in Lancaster County in 2022, according to records obtained by LancasterOnline last year from the Department of State.
The student went to the county elections office in downtown Lancaster last week to apply for a mail-in ballot. His plan was to fill it out immediately and submit it in person.
It turns out it was illegal:
Marian Schneider, an attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said the removal of the student’s voter registration violated federal law, which prohibits removing people from the voter rolls in the final 90 days before a national election.
She said Pennsylvania law is also clear about the right of out-of-state college students to register and vote in the county where their college campus is, so long as they meet all the other criteria for voting. The F&M student met all of those criteria.
“They should restore that registration. They had no business removing it,” Schneider said.
How many people are going to go to the trouble to contest these petty disqualifications? Not all of them, I can guarantee.