True The Vote Under Attack

True The Vote has for over a year now been involved in helping Americans of every stripe to "true" the elections in their home districts. But to those forces that are more interested in ginning up emotions for partisan reasons, True The Vote has become a target of malicious rumors, false claims, and outright lies.

Take a recent editorial in The Texas Independent, for instance. Instead of giving a fair assessment of the work being done by True The Vote, the Independent belittles it by citing the overwrought claims made by a left-wing civil rights organization.

But it isn't just partisan newspapers and left-wing think tanks out to discredit True The Vote. The Democrat Party of Texas is also attempting to destroy and discredit our work. In a Sept. 2011 fundraising letter, the Texas Democrat Party used lies and scare tactics to make people imagine that True The Vote was a racist group out to harm the voting rights of minorities.

And just for extra insurance, Republican activists formed a shadowy "non-partisan" organization closely aligned with the Republican Party called the "King Street Patriots." In 2010, they implemented their "True the Vote" program in Harris County. There the organization's poll watchers, predominantly white people at polling locations in minority neighborhoods, harassed and intimidated voters. Numerous complaints were filed, prompting the County Attorney's office to step in and the Department of Justice to send federal inspectors to monitor the election. The Texas Democratic Party filed suit against the King Street Patriots for operating as an illegal political action committee and violating their nonprofit tax-status. They have publicly stated their intention to take their program nation-wide in 2012.

The purpose of the letter, as mentioned, was fundraising for the Democrat Party, money that will be used to drive further unfair attacks on True The Vote.