Texas Democrats File Suit Against Voting Fraud Law

[Rose Siding]

September 23, 2006

In the latest of the nation’s skirmishes over voting rights, Texas Democrats have sued two top Republican state officials over an antifraud law that the suit says is being used to intimidate minority voters casting ballots by mail.

The action, filed Thursday in federal court in Marshall, challenges both the constitutionality of the law and the way it is being enforced. It contends that Attorney General Greg Abbott and Secretary of State Roger Williams are exaggerating the threat of election fraud and selectively applying the statute, enacted in 2003, so that they can “suppress voting by disfavored groups” that generally support Democrats.

The law makes it a crime in certain cases to carry someone else’s filled-out ballot to the mailbox, to possess another person’s blank ballot or to provide absentee ballot assistance to anyone who has not asked for it.

One plaintiff, Gloria Meeks, a 69-year-old Fort Worth woman who said she was being investigated for helping elderly and disabled voters cast ballots, provided a sworn statement saying two state investigators “peeped into my bathroom window not once but twice while I was in my bathroom drying off from my bath.”

A statement issued by Mr. Abbott’s office did not deny that accusation directly but said the investigators had acted professionally, and added, “It is not uncommon for the target of a criminal investigation to make baseless allegations against law enforcement in order to deflect attention from the serious criminal allegations they face.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/us/politics/23suppress.html?pagewanted=print

[texpatriot2004]

1. Go Texas Dems nm