The Post runs a report about former election judges turned into hectorers poll watchers.
Lucero trained Figel and two other women to be poll monitors Saturday. Volunteers, several bilingual, will be posted outside the polls on Election Day in Colorado precincts heavily populated by Latinos and African-Americans - making sure that each and every voter casts a ballot.
The People for the American Way Foundation has organized Election Protection, a coalition of various civil rights groups and others, to prevent voter disenfranchisement.
"It's just unconscionable that in the US of A that we have to go through this process," Figel said. "We live in a land of liberty, and people are being intimidated. I'm still shaking my head."
So far, the only voter intimidation seems to be by
Kerry voters in Florida. When Colorado Secretary of State issued her initial set of rules for balloting, the
Post was careful to assert that Colorado had no history of voter fraud. They fail to observe that the state has no history of voter intimidation.
Another nonpartisan voter advocacy group, Fair Vote Colorado, will staff as many precincts as possible with volunteers to field voter questions and solve problems as they arise at the polls.
"Non-partisan?" There they go again. Election Protection is run by People for the American Way. Fair Vote Colorado is a spinoff of the Bighorn Center, whose founder, Rutt Bridges, ran for the Democratic nomination for Senate before Ken Salazar entered the race. These organizations are about as non-partisan as NutraSweet is natural.
In fact, this is little more than the "pre-emptive" strike the Democratic poll worker manual has promised. Given the ethnic demographics of Colorado, an appeal of this sort is likely to show more results in the Hispanic community than among blacks. This is more than the normal scare and intimidation tactics, aimed at simultaneously energizing the base and undermining the law. It is also another instance of using the fear of lawsuits over "disparate impact" to avoid confronting the distortions that a large illegal immigrant population pose.
