Smart Girl Politics, Verify the Vote of Maricopa, Pima County Voter Integrity Project held a townhall featuring True the Vote founder, Catherine Englebrecht. The event was held at Gabby Saucedo Mercer’s campaign headquarters in Tucson on South 12th Avenue, this past Sunday.
Members of Be the We were on hand to discuss the RTA election lawsuit in Pima County. Englebrecht told the crowd of approximately 50 that citizen led efforts are needed to restore honor and integrity to our electoral system to ensure free and fair elections.
Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriquez did not attend, however her opponent in the upcoming election, William Beard, was on hand to answer questions from voters on their concerns for the integrity of the Pima County Recorder’s Office.
Catherine Englebrecht, started the True the Vote initiative providing state-specific training, technology and support necessary to equip citizens for participation in the electoral process. Thousands of poll watchers have been trained and mobilized by True the Vote and their research into voter registrations and rolls has supported thousands of citizen challenges, providing empirical evidence to problems.
During the course of investigating voter fraud in Houston County, Engelbrecht, found “frightening and gross incompetence on the part of some election and county workers at the polls.” For example, despite the fact that Texas law allowed 11 different forms of identification to be used at that time to verity identity, as required to vote, she and her 70 election volunteers noticed that many voters were being allowed to vote without any identification at all.
As a result, Texas has since passed voter identification laws that require the use of a photo I.D. As expected, charges against her and her group of attempting to suppress voter participation were made by the Huffington Post and other Democratic Party media outlets. Englebrecht responded by pointing to case in which one election official signed as a voter and that same election official signed the name of different voters on three separate voter applications. She argues that individual voter’s rights are nullified when another person gets three votes to cast.
Engelbrecht’s volunteers ultimately submitted 800 signed affidavits outlining problems they encountered, including having overheard some election judges telling people who they should and should not vote for. After these experiences, the group decided to form True the Vote and to investigate how citizens could help ensure voter integrity and what processes existed to report abuses or irregularities. Engelbrecht says these efforts revealed even more frightening examples of degradation to the election process.
For more information on True the Vote go to www.truethevote.org
Smart Girl Politics in Tucson at sgpkaren@gmail.com (520) 877-3230. Co-sponsors include Verify the Vote of Maricopa, and the Pima County Voter Integrity Project.
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