The Texan behind the charge for voter ID laws

Catherine Engel­brecht, center, in Worthington, Ohio, leads True the Vote. Many of the group's voter fraud claims have been rejected for lack of evidence. Catherine Engel­brecht, center, in Worthington, Ohio, leads True the Vote. Many of the group's voter fraud claims have been rejected for lack of evidence. Photo: MICHAEL F MCELROY Photo: MICHAEL F MCELROY Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close The Texan behind the charge for voter ID laws 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

To see True the Vote's 990 documents, click here.

Anyone listening to Catherine Engelbrecht for any length of time is likely to be convinced that voter fraud is one of the most insidious evils the nation faces. The articulate and passionate founder of True the Vote, a Houston-based tea party organization dedicated to strengthening laws against voter fraud, has convinced several state legislatures of the need for voters to show photo identification at the polling place.

But after three years of national attention - and much success - opponents are pushing back.

Courts have struck down, limited or delayed recently enacted voter ID laws, including in Texas. Election officials in several states, including the swing states of Ohio and North Carolina, have rejected many of the challenges that True the Vote volunteers have provided, usually on grounds of paltry evidence.

Polling experts insist that Engelbrecht, who lives in Richmond, Texas, is exaggerating the problem and that photo identification will do nothing to prevent the most likely type of voter fraud, absentee and mail-in balloting. Critics also suggest the issue may be more of a ploy by Republican political consultants interested in discouraging likely Democratic voters than a matter of pressing national concern.

Insisting that voter fraud is rampant, Engel­brecht announced at a Houston summit gathering in April that True the Vote would be mobilizing a million poll watchers around the country this fall.

The group may fall short of its goal. In an email last week, Engel­brecht said it wasn't possible at the moment to determine how many poll watchers her organization is training. "Internally, however, we are hitting poll watcher volunteer and training goals," she said.

From Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall ballot-box stuffing to Lyndon B. Johnson's notorious Box 13 in Duval County in 1948, election shenanigans and voter fraud are deeply embedded in American history. More recently, Republican suspicions about voter fraud rose after Congress approved the 1993 "motor voter" law and soared after the 2000 election, even though it was the Democrats who charged the presidential election had been stolen.

In 2005, a Senate Republican policy committee report concluded that voter fraud could cancel out "the lawful votes of a vast majority of Americans."

"There have been many proven cases of voter fraud, including fraud that has changed outcomes," said Hans von Spakovsky, a Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration and co-author of "Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk."

More Information To see True the Vote's 990 documents, click here.

Her epiphany

Engelbrecht, 42, grew up in Rosenberg and often tells audiences that until four years ago she was resolutely apolitical. She and her husband looked after their two children and ran a successful oil field machinery business together.

Her epiphany came in 2008, she says, shortly after the election of Barack Obama as president. As she told the New York Times recently, "I saw our country headed in a direction that, for whatever reason - it didn't hit me until 2008 - this really threatens the future of our children."

She was moved to found a tea party group called the King Street Patriots and, along with a couple of dozen other members of the group, worked as a poll watcher in the 2009 local elections. The irregularities and outright fraud she and her fellow volunteers witnessed, she said, prompted them to continue their poll-watching efforts, initially in the congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat.

Voters complained to Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan that they felt harassed and intimidated. Ryan's office did not find instances of fraud or voting irregularities.

"While we have found no significant valid complaint on the issue of voter fraud or dead people voting or any of the other allegations they've made," said Terry O'Rourke, first assistant county attorney, "it has affected our office in that we have institutionalized our office for handling complaints and the education of poll workers and poll watchers."

Nonprofit status

True the Vote, now active in 30 states, was originally registered as a 501 (c)(4), which means it could do some political lobbying but could not focus on partisan efforts. Now officially independent of King Street Patriots, the organization is currently registered with the IRS as a 501 (c)(3). The designation gives it nonprofit status and precludes any partisan activity.

IRS filings for 2010 and 2011 show True the Vote took in $201,644 but ended 2011 with a deficit of $87,885.

In the filings, the group stated its goal in 2010: "Educated, informed and registered voters." In 2011, that changed to "mobilizing and training volunteers to work as election monitors.'' Volunteers "aggressively pursued fraud report(s) to ensure prosecution where appropriate," the group said in the 2011 IRS document.

Despite the nonprofit designation, last August True the Vote donated $5,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee, an avowedly political organization that says its "mission is to elect down ballot, state-level Republican office-holders." In an emailed statement, Engelbrecht called the $5,000 donation a mistake.

Nonpartisan?

Although Engelbrecht insists that True the Vote is nonpartisan, its events invariably feature Republican candidates speaking to tea party adherents.

Engelbrecht and other True the Vote speakers also have made presentations during the past year to Republican-leaning groups funded by Americans for Prosperity, an organization founded by the Koch brothers, Kansas billionaires who contribute large sums to numerous conservative causes.

"True the Vote is not about politics; it is about principle," Engelbrecht said in an interview toward the end of the April conference. "All we want to do is go work at the polls, and I've reaped the whirlwind for daring to ask the question. It makes you wonder: What could we be so close to that we must be stopped at any cost?"

Those who insist that voter fraud is pervasive often cite a Pew Center on the States report earlier this year concluding that 24 million voter registrations are inaccurate or not valid, either because the voter has died or moved or is registered in more than one state.

Critics acknowledge significant "deadwood" among the approximately 150 million Americans registered to vote. But that in itself is not evidence of fraud, they say. Investigations of alleged instances of widespread voting fraud in the past decade or so reveal the number of actual cases to have been minimal, critics of True the Vote contend.

Lightning analogy

"We don't have people attempting to impersonate other people at the polls or vote in the name of a dead person," said Wendy Weiser of the liberal-leaning Brennan Center in New York. "According to all the studies we've done, an American would be more likely to get struck by lightning than commit that kind of fraud."

Last summer, just before the Texas voter ID trial in federal court in Washington, D.C., Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said: "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be stopped."

A list provided by Abbott's office to the Chronicle of 65 voter fraud prosecutions since 1985 suggests it's relatively uncommon. The Chronicle's analysis showed convictions or guilty pleas for eight who were felons, three who impersonated other voters and one each for voting more than once, for voting despite being a non-citizen and for voting under the name of a dead person. Texans cast almost 13 million ballots in the 2008 and 2010 elections alone.

Simple explanations

Engelbrecht insists that the attorney general's numbers don't tell the whole story.

"The Texas attorney general's office is not the warehouse for voter fraud data," she said. "Further, forcing the issue into a slanted equation that states you must have a certain number of cases in which voter ID could have prevented the matter in order to justify the adoption of ID requirements is of no jurisprudential relevance. ''

Alluding to a GOP candidate for Fort Bend County commissioner who allegedly has voted in both Pennsylvania and Texas in the same elections, Engelbrecht insisted that "registration and voter fraud are far too commonplace in Texas and other states to be brushed aside."

She said that in the past several weeks her organization had investigated and turned over evidence of 99 cases of voters casting ballots from two states in a single election.

Critics say that what appears to be voter fraud often turns out to have a simpler explanation.

In Georgia in 1998, Alan Mandel voted even though he appeared to have died in 1997. But Alan J. Mandell, very much alive, voted in 1998 and state election officials determined afterward that a poll worker had confused the names. "Mandell" had signed the voter certificate of the deceased "Mandel."

In New Jersey, the state's Republican Party uncovered evidence 4,397 individuals had voted more than once within the state in 2004. Among them was a woman, Kathleen Sullivan, who reportedly voted twice in locations 161 miles apart. Further investigation by the Brennan Center revealed that two Kathleen Sullivans, with the same dates of birth and name spellings, were legally registered and both had voted in their respective home towns.

dan@hearstdc.comjoe.holley@chron.com