John Shinkle/POLITICO Cummings confronts anti-fraud group

A top Democratic lawmaker is going after True the Vote, a prominent conservative anti-vote-fraud group, over concerns that its efforts may adversely impact minority voters.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has sent two letters to the Houston-based organization seeking “specific documents about the manner in which True the Vote and its affiliated organizations have been challenging the registration of thousands of voters across the country based on insufficient, inaccurate and faulty evidence.”


Concerned about voter fraud and “election integrity,” True the Vote has declared that it wants to deploy up to 1 million volunteers across the country to monitor what happens on Election Day.

Cummings complained that True the Vote has “not produced a single document” yet in response to his original Oct. 4 letter, but has asked for a face-to-face meeting with the Maryland Democrat. Cummings declined any such meeting until True the Vote turns over the information he is seeking, which includes estimates of the number of poll monitors it will field, where these monitors will be sent, and copies of the voter rolls it is using to determine voter eligibility.

Citing reports of True the Vote’s activities in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Texas, Cummings also said there “is mounting evidence that True the Vote’s aggressive poll monitoring tactics are being coordinated closely with the Republican Party.”

“On October 12, 2012, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights issued a report concluding that True the Vote’s poll monitoring efforts in North Carolina appear to be aimed at African American and other minority communities that historically have voted for Democratic candidates,” Cummings wrote. “According to the author, the information in the report demonstrates that your organization has a ‘highly partisan and political agenda to deny African Americans and Latinos, specifically, the right to vote.’”

Cummings said any efforts to intentionally and improperly challenge the rights of minority voters to go to the polling booth “could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their Constitutional rights.”

In its response to Cummings’s Oct. 4 letter, True the Vote complained that Cummings was acting off of inaccurate news reports and “secondhand knowledge or poor staff-researched understanding of our organization’s activities.”

This article tagged under: Elijah Cummings

Politics

Voters