True the Vote to be focus of Tucson town hall

Smart Girl Politics, Verify the Vote of Maricopa, Pima County Voter Integrity Project are hosting a townhall at Gabby Saucedo Mercer’s campaign headquarters 4550 S 12th Ave., from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, April 15. True the Vote founder, Catherine Englebrecht will be the featured speaker. The topic will be what can be accomplished by citizen led efforts to restore honor and integrity to our electoral system to ensure free and fair elections.

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 solve the problems.

True the Vote has revealed some startling information. According to Engelbrecht, what started as a simple effort to exercise civic duty and get involved brought them face to face with what she referred to as frightening and gross incompetence on the part of some election and county workers at the polls. Engelbrecht pointed out that even though 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. Texas has since passed voter identification laws that require the use of a photo I.D.

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

For questions about this event, contact Karen Schutte with 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.