Ned Ryun
The American Spectator
4/6/2011
One of the fundamental rights in our constitutional republic is the right to vote. But just as importantly, our free society is built on the idea of voter integrity: one person, one vote. When the validity of a vote, or the voting process, is called into question, both the legitimacy of the government and society as a whole suffer.
Voter integrity has always been an issue in America. If you’ve seen the movie Gangs of New York, set in the 1860s in New York City, there are scenes of the Irishmen voting, then having their hair cut to alter their appearance so that they can be sent back to vote again. In recent times, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has been charged with voter fraud…
…in Houston, Harris County tax assessor Paul Bettencourt found that nearly 10,000 of the 30,000 forms turned in by ACORN were invalid. All of this behavior led to questions about the integrity of our electoral process. But instead of sitting and doing nothing about it, someone did stand up, and in the true can-do spirit of what would become the Tea Party, took the bull by the horns.
That someone was Catherine Engelbrecht…
…she founded the King Street Patriots, an organization that would move beyond protesting. But the real “what-to-do” dawned on Engelbrecht in the fall of 2009. There was a need for people to work at the polls, so she and 20 others decided to volunteer as alternate judges and clerks. The experience was an eye-opener. “When we worked, we saw big problems. Not only were polls run like the typical government agency, inefficient and confusing, they were also very vulnerable to fraud, which we saw time and again,” she says. “There were people being allowed to vote without showing any identification, people who’d say ‘I don’t know who to vote for,’ at which point an election judge would jump up, escort them to the voting booth, dial in the vote, and tell the voter to ‘press here.’ ”
Engelbrecht walked away knowing something had to be done, which led the King Street Patriots to launch True the Vote. The project has one aim: to restore integrity to the American system of electing its leaders. With True the Vote, the King Street Patriots have, as she described it, “deconstructed the entire process, focusing on educating voters, examining the registry, recruiting, training and mobilizing election officials and poll workers, collecting data all along the way, then used the data to shape government action and legislative agendas to support desperately needed election code reform.”…
…Since last November’s elections, True the Vote has expanded into a national program. “We currently have participation in 45 states,” Engelbrecht says….
Read the entire article at The American Spectator
