771 search results for ""voter fraud""

Colorado is making it easier to vote in a big way

by David Atkins

Via Greg Sargent:

It hasn’t gotten the national attention it deserves, but a sweeping measure to overhaul elections in Colorado is swiftly moving towards passage — one that could function as a model for other voting reformers in other states, and perhaps even nationally. The Colorado measure will represent a big step forward, because it sticks to the most fundamental principle that most reformers think should guide our efforts to fix voting: That voting should be made easier for as many people as possible.

This, at a time when conservative groups are working to restrict voting in the name of “voter fraud.” As Reid Wilson recently put it, the Colorado measure is “the Democratic comeback to voter ID.”

Reform advocates who have been briefed on Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper’s plans tell me they expect him to sign the legislation tomorrow. The measure, which has cleared both houses in Colorado, contains a number of key provisions. It requires a ballot to be mailed to every registered voter; voters choose how to vote, whether by mail or dropping off the ballot, or even in person, early or on election day. It lengthens the early voting period and shortens the time required for state residency in order to qualify to vote. It expands voter registration through Election Day. And it allows people to vote at any precinct within their county.

“The biggest problem is people showing up at the wrong precinct,” Ellen Dumm, spokesperson for Coloradans for Voter Access and Modernized Elections, tells me. “This is unique in that expands all options. It really does expand access to voting at a time when we’ve seen a lot of restriction of voting. This makes voting a lot easier.”

Another idea out there in California is being promoted by own state senator Hannah-Beth Jackson is to pre-register teenagers to vote so that they’re automatically eligible vote once they turn 18:

State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) has just introduced a bill that would allow 15-year-olds to pre-register to vote.

Senate Bill 113 does not change the voting age. But it would allow a person to fill out the necessary forms to become pre-registered beginning at 15, an age when young people typically head to the DMV to get their instructional permit or driver’s license. Since 1995, the federal Motor Voter Law has allowed voter registration when applying for a driver’s license.

“Becoming a driver is an important rite of passage, and so is becoming a voter,” said Jackson. “When teenagers take the wheel to become a driver, we’re saying, let’s create an easy opportunity for them to also become a future voter.”

And, of course, there’s switching election day from Tuesday to a weekend–or better yet, making federal election days national holidays.

Of all the ills Republicans do, restricting access to democracy is among the most injurious.

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Watching JJ squirm

by digby

Because I just can’t get enough of this stuff:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) defended President Barack Obama at a Phoenix town hall Wednesday when a constituent asked him why Congress had not impeached the president.

“I do not believe that the President has committed impeachable offenses — that’s high crimes,” McCain said in response to a woman named Angelica. While McCain received scattered applause for his answer, Angela received significantly more cheers from the audience for her question.

“But I would remind you, and I hate to remind you, I really dislike reminding you — the president just was reelected by a majority of the American people,” he added.

It was a strangely familiar position for McCain, who, during the 2008 presidential election, famously defended then-candidate Obama at a town hall when a questioner said the Democratic candidate was “an Arab.”

Over four years later, McCain is still dealing with conspiracy theories. One of the last people to ask McCain a question on Wednesday asserted that Obama won elections “because of voter fraud.”

What does he expect? What do any of these Republicans expect? They’ve been peddling bizarroworld reality for a very long time. I agree that it’s shocking so many people believe this crap, but there you have it.

And, by the way, when it really counted, McCain was spinning like a top trying to get re-elected. And every day that he pimps Benghazi like it means something, he adds to this lunacy.

Saturday afternoon fun

by digby

For your entertainment, a random Breitbart comment thread:

JTRPOP
I’m a hardcore conservative, but look what the 1st Tea Party did…Obama was reelected, and the Tea Party was vilified by the media. & Occupy was praised.

RIGHTINTEXAS
So that is a good reason to whine and roll over? We only are defeated if we quit.

PATRIOT
We have quit. Mitt won hands down & we did nothing. Whats left to do? Become a terrorest against our own country?

KOZANNE
Don’t think we haven’t been branded terrorists of a sort already? We’re damned if we do and damned if we dont, so at this point, let’s give ’em all a really, really, really good reason to lie about us some more.

I’m at the point where I don’t really give a damn about the 0bamabots anymore. They made their choice, let ’em take the consequences. Any fight left in me is for my descendants and for my fellow patriots. I’m not going off the cliff with the lemmings, dammit.

CHRIS BLAKE
Possibly. Hope not, but possibly. But explain how being a Patriot, and supporting the Constitution against foreign AND domestic enemies is being a terrorist against our own country? It is working in support of it.

AGNTORNGVCTM
Yes. Armed insurrection is a viable strategy. I’ll be there, throwing my — oh, what is it this week? — my left kidney at the White House.

John Kerry threw somebody’s military medals at the White House when he was upset and I got my medical problems from the same place those medals came from. It’s only fair.

Besides, all I can do is blog anymore. It would be a good diversion and somewhat therapeutic.

SAM TAMP
Stop voting for the republican party! We are their masters not the other way around.

RIGHTINTEXAS
We? I have not.

REDLEY62
Give to the Tea Party! They at least did something for our country in 2010 mid elections. Get rid of the RINO’s in the GOP is the work that has to be done.
Don’t give up—get mad OR get on the railroad car headed to the showers—your choice!

ELAINE
Vote and support all conservatives in 2014 and take the MAJORITY away from Harry. Do that, keep the House and BO is rendered powerless for his last two years. I will never give up!

REDLEY62
NO, YOU have quit! NOT We have quit…

LISA4USA
The TEA Party is not terrorist and this is not America any longer, ‘patriot’.
“What’s left to do?” According to you, it would be to just lie down and die…and that’s just what they want.

FRANK455444
Thats what had to be done to CREATE this nation to begin with.

DANIEL BURKE
Massive voter fraud is why Obama is occupying the oval office. If GOP refuses to fight for honest elections they are useless to us.

ACONSERVATIVEFIRST
Patriot, we have not quit. We lost an election. The Tea Party is still intact. There is much left to do i.e. indoctrination in our education, vote fraud, corrupted media, open borders, dirty politicians, repeal of 90+% of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid’s treasonous treachery to our Nation, and a few more…
We need your support, not a defeatist attitude hung around our necks. Help us. Visit your local Tea Party and get involved on some level. It’s a good thing. You’ll be glad you did.

JESSICASHERWOOD
Throw in a compliant media, and the GOP had a strawman they could use…. http://youtube.qr.net/jOyC/wat…

XANNY
The GOP can’t challenge voter fraud because of the 1981 lawsuite against the RNC case no.09-4615. limiting their ability to engage or asist in voter fraud prevention. See www.fellowshipofminds.wordpres…. Time for a new party, maybe the Gop and the Tea Party together to form a new party.

RUMORCT
We have not quit.

VAPOR MAN
Your Country has been hijacked… you are living in a Post Constitutional oligopoly that has been sold to the highest bidder. The sooner people realize this the sooner we can take the country back.

LDOMIN
Ridley62 I think we should stop blaming one another. That is what this administration want…more division amongst us. We need to stand together and fight for our country and our liberty. We have to do this or everything is lost.

GUY DUDEBRO
If you study the numbers, nobody will ever be able to overtake the Santa Claus Party. It’s time to prepare for Revolution.

In fairness, I’ve read similar threads on liberal blogs after a loss. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it when it happens to the other side.

Illegitimate presidency

by digby

I’m fairly sure that within a short period of time a large number of Americans will truly believe that the 2012 election was stolen through voter fraud. Considering all the hype before hand and the fact that they had convinced themselves they had it won, I suppose it was inevitable.

But stories like this are starting to crop up all over the place:

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) told a radio host he completely agreed with her assertion that investigations are needed to determine why President Obama lost “every one” of the states with photo identification requirements for voting, yet won re-election. Cuccinelli, who has lost most of the major legal cases he has brought since taking office in 2010, told the host she was “preaching to the choir.”

I know it’s hard to believe they would actually be that gullible, but consider that 30% of Republicans believe Obama is a practicing Muslim. Clearly, millions of them will believe anything.

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No more doubt about voter suppression

by digby

At some point Americans are going to have to wake up and recognize that the Republican Party is just plain undemocratic:

A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.

Republican leaders said in proposing the law that it was meant to save money and fight voter fraud. But a former GOP chairman and former Gov. Charlie Crist, both of whom have been ousted from the party, now say that fraud concerns were advanced only as subterfuge for the law’s main purpose: GOP victory.

Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer says he attended various meetings, beginning in 2009, at which party staffers and consultants pushed for reductions in early voting days and hours.

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.
[…]
[Governor Charlie] Crist said party leaders approached him during his 2007-2011 gubernatorial term about changing early voting, in an effort to suppress Democrat turnout. Crist is now at odds with the GOP, since abandoning the party to run for U.S. Senate as an independent in 2010. He is rumored to be planning another run for governor, as a Democrat.

Crist said in a telephone interview this month that he did not recall conversations about early voting specifically targeting black voters “but it looked to me like that was what was being suggested. And I didn’t want them to go there at all.”
About inhibiting minority voters, Greer said:

“The sad thing about that is yes, there is prejudice and racism in the party but the real prevailing thought is that they don’t think minorities will ever vote Republican,” he said. “It’s not really a broad-based racist issue. It’s simply that the Republican Party gave up a long time ago ever believing that anything they did would get minorities to vote for them.”

But a GOP consultant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution said black voters were a concern.

“I know that the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves,” he said.

That voter suppression was the point was obvious to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the history of the United States. When you have the former Governor of the state admitting it, it’s pretty much case closed.

I do have to wonder whether those who think there is no racism involved understand what racism is. You’d think it would occur to them that African Americans are less likely to vote for the people who’ve been trying to keep them from voting for centuries. This doesn’t come from nowhere.

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Keeping the “urbans” in their place

by digby

When the Republicans get introspective it’s always interesting what psychic rocks they end up turning over:

As Representative Paul D. Ryan casts about to find an explanation for the defeat of the Republican presidential ticket, on which he was Mitt Romney’s running mate, he is looking to the nation’s big cities for answers.

“The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview with WISC-TV back home in Wisconsin on Monday before returning Tuesday to Capitol Hill for the start of the lame-duck session.

“When we watched Virginia and Ohio coming in,” Mr. Ryan said, “and those ones coming in as tight as they were and looking like we were going to lose them, that’s when it became clear we weren’t going to win.”

Mr. Ryan, now a potential 2016 presidential candidate, has repeated the sentiment in subsequent interviews. And he is not the only conservative who has embraced the notion that a surge of voters in urban America gave Mr. Obama the prize, as many Republicans try to come to grips with how an election they believed was theirs for the taking instead got away.

When I worked in the movie business, I often had to deal with overseas buyers who would explicitly refuse to acquire what they called “urban” movies, because their audience allegedly didn’t “relate.” That euphemism never fools anyone.

I’ve rarely had a nice thing to say about Paul Ryan, but I have never thought he was one to pander openly to those members of the base who have, shall we say, somewhat old fashioned views when it comes to race. For all his faults I didn’t think he was one of those guys.
But that certainly sounds like one of those guys. And considering the massive effort to portray those voters as attempting to steal elections through voter fraud, this excuse is even more sinister.

Also, Mr Very Serious Budget Wonk got his very serious analysis wrong. Again:

But pointing to urban voters for the Republican failure to win last week does not take into account that the Republican ticket also lost big in some rural, mostly white states, like Iowa and New Hampshire.

And there is little proof from the results of the election that urban turnout over all played the decisive role in swing states like Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia or Wisconsin, where Mitt Romney lost in Mr. Ryan’s suburban home district…

“What Paul Ryan misses is that the Republicans have been losing the urban vote for a long, long time,” said Marc Morial, the president and chief executive of the National Urban League.

Mr. Morial said he did not know why Mr. Ryan was focusing attention on the nation’s urban core as the cause of the Republican losses. But he said the decision by Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan not to attend his group’s annual conference was not a good sign that Mr. Ryan wants more outreach in the future.

Yeah, I’d say that bridge has probably been burned. And that may explain why Ryan’s out there still fanning the voter fraud flames.

Their cheatin’ hearts: True the Vote

by digby

Here’s just one little story about attempted vote suppressors being hoist on their own petard:

A Houston-based group that wanted to monitor 30 Franklin County polling places for potential voter fraud was thwarted yesterday by the county elections board.

True the Vote – whose Ohio branch is called the Voter Integrity Project – was denied status as official observers because most of the candidates who supported the organization’s effort withdrew their backing. State law allows groups of at least five candidates to assign poll observers, and the group originally had obtained signatures from a bipartisan group of six candidates for county office.

“The Franklin County Board of Elections did not allow Election Day polling location observer appointments filed by the True the Vote group,” said board spokesman Ben Pisctelli in a statement. “The appointments were not properly filed and our voting location managers were instructed not to honor any appointment on behalf of the True the Vote group.”

There were charges yesterday that the candidates’ names had either been falsified or merely copied on forms requesting observer status for the True the Vote at several Franklin County polling places. Many are in predominantly African American neighborhoods.

The irony of them cheating in order to monitor election fraud is just too delicious.

Elections Director William A. Anthony Jr. said the group may be investigated for possibly falsifying documents after today’s election. The forms themselves warn that elections falsification is a fifth-degree felony…

One person told the elections board that she attended True the Vote training sessions and the observers were instructed to use cameras to intimidate voters when they enter the polling place, record their names on tablet computers and send them to a central location, and attempt to stop questionably qualified voters before they could get to a voting machine.

Just a reminder that the entire party, from Romney on down, is counting on these “poll watchers” to alert their legal team to anything they deem suspicious.

But you have to admire True the Vote’s chutzpah:

“These allegations by the Ohio Democratic Party are dangerous and offensive,” True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said in a statement. “The facts are simple: no citizen volunteer — including…anyone else trained by True the Vote — took any action that was either illegal or unethical, particularly as it pertains to the placement of poll watchers.”

The statement added: “This is a final, desperate attempt to deny citizens their right to observe elections. 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. If the Ohio Democratic Party thinks True the Vote-trained poll watchers are legion, wait until it meets our lawyers.”

I know you are but what am I?

Oh, and I’m sure this will shock you, but True the Vote seems to be spending at least 80% of its time observing in African-American and Hispanic precincts:

A partial list of precincts targeted by a Pittsburgh Tea Party group working on behalf of the Republican Party shows that nearly 80 percent of the voters in those precincts are African-American, compared to 13 percent countywide, according to civil rights and union groups who on Monday called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate.

An Ohio political blog is reporting that forms submitted to election officials by Tea Party spin-off group True the Vote in Franklin County — which includes Columbus — show poll watchers heading to 28 precincts, where most voters are African-American. Overall, the county electorate is 20 percent African-American.

“We’ve been concerned from the beginning that the efforts of True the Vote and aligned groups were going to be targeted largely in communities of color,” said Eric Marshall, manager of legal mobilization for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We’ve seen in the past where these kinds of tactics can lead to intimidation and harassment of voters.”

A potentially even greater concern now is that the groups will use the voter challenge process “for the express purpose of creating lines and confusion,” Marshall said.

Prohibitively long lines, particularly where Democrats are in the majority, are a net plus for Republicans; extraordinarily long lines for early voting in South Florida resulted from Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s rollback of early voting days there.

Update II: I think we know why Romney has been putting such aseemingly quixotic effort into Pennsylvania:

An Allegheny County judge on Tuesday issued an order to halt electioneering outside a polling location in Homestead.

County officials received a complaint shortly before 10 a.m. Tuesday that Republicans outside a polling location on Maple Street in Homestead were stopping people outside the polls and asking for identification.

The order states: “Individuals outside the polls are prohibited from questioning, obstructing, interrogating or asking about any form of identification and/demanding any form of identification from any prospective voter.”

Of course, what legal is also almost unbearably stupid:

Poll watchers will ask for photo ID, but voters need not show identification for this year’s election.

They can ask, but voters have to know that they must tell them to go to hell.

Update III: Fergawdsakes

Here’s the thing: it’s an African American precinct. Are they suggesting that this black panther is intimidating black Romney voters? I don’t think that’s a serious problem.  Every last black Romney voter either works for the Republican Party or Fox News so it’s highly unlikely they’re voting in this precinct.

No, for Fox’s charges to make sense, these “black panthers” must be Romney supporters. Just sayin’.
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Election Day Gossip: tainting the victory, faithless electors and more

by digby

Take the conversation related at the beginning of this article with a grain of salt since it’s a “my sister’s best friend’s brother told me” sort of thing, but I think it’s a fair representation of the way the conservatives are gaming out their strategy in case it’s close and Obama wins the electoral college but not the popular vote:

Romney has began airing commercials and ramped up campaigning in states not considered battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Oregon. Some political observers say this is being done to gather stray undecided voters in these states and increase the chance and margin of a popular-vote victory.

There is also speculation that Romney may apply a strategy reportedly considered by George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000 if he lost the electoral vote to Vice President Al Gore, but won the popular vote–the opposite of what actually happened in the election.

Romney may be preparing a set of talking points that the Electoral College is essentially unfair and back this argument with a massive Fox News and talk-radio blitz that would fuel doubt in the legitimacy of an Obama win… In fact, Bush’s campaign advisers in 2000 contemplated creating a “Democrats for Democracy” group to make this point, if necessary.

I remember all that talk in 2000. It was quite open (not that they showed even the slightest compunction about taking the opposite tack when they ended up fighting for an electoral college win while Gore clearly had won the popular vote.) They were also plotting to turn some “faithless electors”:

In 158 instances, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector’s personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was the U.S. presidential election of 1836, in which 23 Virginia electors conspired to change their vote together.

I think that in close elections this talk always comes up. But with a professional propaganda apparatus at their disposal, I could see a serious attempt being made on bogus claims of vote fraud under the right circumstances.

Anyway, it’s highly unlikely that it will come to that. This is, by far, the more important strategy:

No incumbent president seeking a second term has ever won the electoral college and lost the popular vote. And a win in the electoral college for Barack Obama that is not accompanied by one in the popular vote could cast a shadow over the president and his ability to govern. Republicans have already been fussing about perceived voter fraud to this end, but a popular-vote victory for Romney will further support this cause.

“This is the point she was trying to make,” said the donor who declined to give to the PAC. “I don’t think they want to steal the election by saying ‘the popular vote should be counted instead of the electoral vote,’ I think they want to cut the nuts off a second term for Obama.”

I am one of those who sees little chance that the GOP will be chastened by this loss regardless of the numbers. But recalling that 20 years ago GOP House leadership standing on the floor declaring that Clinton was not their president at least partially because he’d won with only a plurality of the vote, I can easily see them rationalizing their obstruction in this way.

The Republicans are a very, very effective opposition Party.

Update: A National Review post called “Crush Them” has been making the rounds and it really is worth reading, if only because it so perfectly exemplifies the conservative belief that liberalism is fundamentally illegitimate.

Maybe I’m wrong and all the alleged wise men of the GOP will emerge from their underground bunkers and take the party back from the crazies and we can go back to the glory days of Tipnronnie and have ourselves one Grand Bargain after another. But I doubt it.

The fight will go on. And that’s ok. As long as people aren’t killing each other over it, we’ll get by.

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Tracking the disenfranchised in an election that’s “within the margin of litigation”

by digby

American Bridge has done some of the most aggressive trcking during this election season. And they are going to be just as aggressive on election day:

They spent the campaign season stalking Republican candidates and looking for YouTube-worthy gaffes. Now, a group of 19 trackers with a liberal super PAC will have a new target on Election Day: disenfranchised voters.

The trackers, who are affiliated with the American Bridge 21st Century super PAC, will be dispatched on Tuesday to key battleground states, including Colorado, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. Their plan is to document testimonials from voters who run into problems at the polls.

American Bridge put out a news release on Friday that said trackers will be looking for “unusually long lines, enforcement of non-existent voter ID requirements, excessive use of provisional ballots, limited accessibility to the polling location,” as well as false information form poll workers…

Harris said American Bridge trackers will be particularly interested in True the Vote, a Tea Party-affiliated organization that set a goal of training a million poll watchers this election cycle. He also said the trackers will be looking at poll monitors in Wisconsin who were reportedly encouraged to go incognito by the Romney campaign.

Regardless of how the election turns out tomorrow, our election system is in crisis and all of this needs to be documented.

It’s also worth pointing out that even some Republicans understand what a crock this voter fraud jihad is:

Since the race is “within the margin of litigation” Rich Hasen’s election law blog is the go-to site to track these issues. You might want to bookmark it in advance.

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Back to Ohio

by digby

By this point everyone should know about Ohio Secretary of State Jon “Katherine Harris” Husted. He’s gettin’ ‘er done. Here’s Ari Berman:

Once again Husted is playing the voter suppression card, this time at the eleventh hour, in a controversial new directive concerning provisional ballots. In an order to election officials on Friday night, Husted shifted the burden of correctly filling out a provisional ballot from the poll worker to the voter, specifically pertaining to the recording of a voter’s form of ID, which was previously the poll worker’s responsibility. Any provisional ballot with incorrect information will not be counted, Husted maintains. This seemingly innocuous change has the potential to impact the counting of thousands of votes in Ohio and could swing the election in this closely contested battleground…

In 2008, 40,000 of the 207,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio were rejected. The majority of the state’s provisional ballots were cast in Ohio’s five largest counties, which are strongly Democratic. Moreover, provisional ballots are more likely to be cast by poorer and more transient residents of the state, who are also less likely to vote Republican.

The number of discarded provisional ballots could rise significantly due to Husted’s directive. It’s also very likely that more provisional ballots will be cast in 2012 than in 2008, thanks to a wave of new voting restrictions in Ohio and nationwide. The Associated Press reported that 31 percent of the 2.1 provisional ballots cast nationwide in 2008 were not counted, and called provisional ballots the “hanging chads of 2012.”

A series of missteps by the secretary of state and new rulings by the courts have increased the use of provisional ballots and could delay the outcome of the election and the legitimacy of the final vote.

Read on for the ugly details.

If this happens I’m fairly sure that everyone will just throw up their hands again and say “get over it” but at some point fixing our electoral system to prevent these shennanigans has to happen if the United States wants to continue to claim to be a democracy. When partisan election chiefs openly suppress the votes of their political rivals, you’ve crossed the line, even if the members of the jaded political establishment simply take a quick sniff of snuff, shake out their lace cuffs and declare the controversy dull and boring.

After the Ohio controversy of 2004 I wondered if Democrats were creating a legitimacy crisis by claiming that the voting machines had been hacked (among other things.) I was very short sighted and wrong. Even though I’ve been following this vote suppression campaign for a very long time, it never occurred to me that they would be able to institutionalize this “voter fraud” myth so quickly. They are very good at what they do.

Meanwhile, in Florida, early voting is in chaos. I think we all know about the possibility for a disputed election down there …

Update: Ah CNN, we can always count on you to claim that this is all silly partisan posturing, with the Tea Party backed “vote fraud” zealots True the Vote and Election Protection being two sides of the same coin:

JOE JOHNS, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Long lines in south Florida and in Cincinnati, Ohio, as early voting comes to a close, and those aren’t the only crowd this hotly contested election has attracted.

ERIC MARSHALL, ELECTION PROTECTION: Ten thousand grassroots and legal volunteers across the country in election country.

CHRISTIAN ADAMS, TRUE THE VOTE: Everywhere. They’re going to be everywhere. They’ve trained people in 50 states to legally poll watch.

JOHNS: Lawyer and poll watch of all political stripes descending on Ohio and across the country in search of any issues that need to be challenged.

MARSHALL: We’re looking for long lines that might be the result of machines breaking down, poll workers that might be asking the wrong question, asking for ID when they shouldn’t be.

JOHNS: Groups like the left leaning Election Protection have been training for weeks so they’re ready to respond to any problems at the polls in real time.

MARSHALL: With all the changes nationally in the voting laws, I think we’re prepared for there to be a significant amount of confusion on Election Day.

JOHNS: But controversy over how they do their job, poll watching has become part of the business.

(on camera): What do you think of the election protection people?

ADAMS [True the Vote]: Look, they have problems.

JOHNS (voice-over): Former Justice Department lawyer Christian Adams now represents True the Vote, a Tea Party-affiliated vote with a simple goal.

ADAMS: Free and fair elections. True the Vote stands with election integrity. Follow the law, period.

JOHNS: But True the Vote has real critics of their own from the left.

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS (D), MARYLAND: True to Vote has been stay it is likely challenged the voting rights of legitimate voters we must address anybody who tries to deny anybody that right to vote and I consider it criminal. I consider it unpatriotic and I think — and highly offensive.

JOHNS: A claim Adams does not take likely.

ADAMS: They’re liars. They’re bearing false witness against law-abiding citizens who are doing no more than observing the process, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

No, he is the liar. True the Vote is doing a whole lot more than “observing”. They are actively interfering. But don’t worry, they aren’t just ordinary citizens. Republicans have installed some of these lunatics in official positions in Ohio.

And then there’s this:

JOHNS: Whatever the election watchers find, it may ultimately be up to super lawyers like Ted Olson to determine whether to go to court. Olson, a Romney adviser, led Republicans to victory from a Supreme Court battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.

THEODORE OLSON, 2000 BUSH CAMPAIGN LAWYER: I’m clearing my calendar just in case I need to be ready for the next five weeks.

JOHNS: He says if elections officials want to avoid litigation, they shouldn’t change direction in the middle of the game.

OLSON: If you follow the rules that were in place on Election Day with respect to counting the ballots, then the presumptive outcome will be respected when the Electoral College votes are counted.

JOHNS (on camera): But the truth is there could be other changes to the rules especially as states affected by the superstorm get ready for the election.

Notice the similar language of Adams the Tea Partier and Olson the top lawyer: “Follow the law, period.” No matter how trivial, no matter how many it disenfranchises, every tiny bureaucratic rule is sacred when it comes to counting the votes of Democrats. There will be no exceptions, even to allow citizens to cast their legal vote.

The good news is that Democrats are more prepared this time and have their people ready to go too. If there’s going to be a post election fight it won’t be as one-sided this time.

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