Tea partiers confer in Houston to fight vote fraud

[Valin]

Houston Chronicle:

Joe Holley

4/28/12

 

"There are only so many protests you can go to," Spring romance novelist Barbara Smith said Friday night, explaining between speeches in the ballroom of a suburban Houston hotel why in 2009 she joined the King Street Patriots, a local tea party group and got active as a poll watcher in 2010. She was among some 350 people from 32 states who signed up for a two-day True the Vote conference devoted to recognizing and rooting out election fraud.

 

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Elected officials in attendance included U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Houston, state Rep. Jim Murphy, R-Houston, and Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.

 

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Hans Von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, assured his listeners that voter fraud is indeed a major problem in this country. "Elections are stolen regularly because of voter fraud," he said.

 

Spakovsky and other speakers, including Artur Davis, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama, and National Review columnist John Fund, insisted that resistance to a mandate that every voter show identification at the polls is absurd. Voter ID does not suppress voter turnout among minorities, the elderly or the poor, they maintained.

 

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