The "what are you going to do about it" election gambit

In recent weeks, the Texas-based group, with many local affiliates drawn from Tea Party ranks, has been urging poll workers in key Ohio counties—primarily Republicans—to supplement their official state training with TrueTheVote materials. These Election Day workers are not the observers chosen by political parties who can watch but not interfere with voting; they are the people who are drawn from both parties and employed by the state to run the voting process.

“A few weeks back it was reported that TrueTheVote had talked about doing trainings,” said Brian Rothenberg, ProgressOhio Executive Director. “It appears that some offshoot of the Tea Party is now training elections workers in Hamilton County and we’re starting to hear that it’s happening in other counties, and that requests are being made for lists of poll workers throughout Ohio—to provide extra training.”

It is a crime in Ohio to interfere with conducting an election. Moreover, after the 2004 presidential election the state signed a federal consent decree that, among other things, established uniform poll worker training. Whether TrueTheVote’s interference with the state’s official trainings violates these legal standards has not been tested in court.

But the possibility that the group might be urging poll workers to use different standards other than what’s prescribed by the state is disturbing, said Dan Tokaji , an election law professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

“I don’t know what TrueTheVote has planned for Election Day. It would troubling be if outside groups were giving training to poll workers that conflicts with their legal obligation,” he said. “They are effectively state officials. Anything they do would be considered state action.”

Requests for comment with the Hamilton County Board of Elections and Ohio Secretary of State office were not returned by press time.

The U.S. has a history of partisans interfering—or trying to interfere—with voting at the polls, Tokaji said. Famously, decades before William Rehnquist became U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, he tried to discourage [8] Latinos from voting in Arizona. In 2008 in Ohio, a GOP effort to obtain statewide voter files to screen for what it said was incorrectly registered voters was blocked in court, preventing [9] so-called voter ‘caging.’

This summer, AlterNet secretly attended a TrueTheVote workshop in Colorado, where attendees were encouraged to police polling places. The organizers spoke of the need to take extra steps to verify voter identity, such as comparing a poll book’s signature to a voter’s ID, as well as asking for more proof of identification. That step would exceed legal standards because when a voter signs a poll book to get a ballot, their signature is an oath under penalty of perjury. The organizers also told people to be wary when an infirm voter seeks assistance—saying that could lead to fraudulent voting.