Past Voter Intimidation in Philadelphia and Opportunity to Stop It This Year

[JPZenger]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/27/14221/408/37/643726

Here's an excerpt from a post asking people to join the Obama Voter Protection Program:

"You don't need to know a thing about election law to do this. Trust me. What we need are folks who are smart enough to recognize a problem (and we've got checklists), address it on-site if possible using basic persuasion skills and the psychological power of business attire, and who will know when something needs to be referred back to HQ.

We are especially in need of people registered to vote in Philadelphia who are lawyers, law students, legal professionals and anyone who you think is probably smart enough to go to law school to serve as inside-the-polling-place monitors for the campaign.

Just weeks ago, fliers were anonymously placed under car windshield wipers in minority sections of the city, falsely insisting that "on the day of the election there will be undercover officers to execute warrants" based on those who come out to vote and that anyone who had "outstanding warrants or traffic offenses" had better clear things up, since voting was the one time they had to use their real identities. The flier also asserted that at polling places, police cars equipped with "plate identification computers" would boot any scofflaw cards.

During our 2003 Mayor's race, men with clipboards driving black vans bearing official-looking insignias were reportedly dispatched to African American neighborhoods to ask minority voters for their identification cards. Tom Lindenfeld, who ran a counter-intimidation campaign for Democratic candidate John Street, said there were 300 cars with the decals resembling such federal agencies as the DEA and ATF and that the men were asking prospective voters for identification. In a post-election poll of 1000 African-American voters, seven percent said they had encountered such efforts.

We are not in the business of challenging Republican voters or engaging in confrontational behavior; we want all legal voters to be able to vote. Period.

visit http://www.pavoterprotection.com to learn more.