Voter Intimidation: Hiding In Plain Sight

“Election integrity monitoring” is one element of the Maryland Republican Party’s ambitious early voting plan, wrote a former press secretary and speech writer to Robert Ehrlich, Jr. in a Baltimore Sun op-ed this week.

There’s another way to describe election integrity monitoring. It’s voter suppression and intimidation.

Unwarranted challenges to people’s right to vote, literature that gives the wrong date for the election or misleadingly implies that you can’t vote if you haven’t paid your rent or your parking tickets, or outright intimidation by posting off-duty law enforcement officials in uniform at polls in targeted areas.

These tactics are used in districts with high Democratic turnout and a high percentage or African-American or Hispanic voters.

Four years ago, the guide that urged Republican poll watchers in Maryland to challenge voters was leaked to the Washington Post the week before the election.

Whether or not such challenges uncover any fraud, they “just try to cause chaos and long lines,” stated the director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections in 2006.

“Election integrity monitoring” for this fall’s election by Maryland Republicans is now hiding in plain sight.

Channeling Ronald Reagan, “There they go again.”

Mr. Ehrlich should personally repudiate such tactics.