Tea Party Poll-Watchers Set Sights On Latino Community

By Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post Latino Voices

A Tea Party spinoff group training poll-watchers to either monitor or intimidate voters — depending on whom you believe — is now explicitly expanding its reach into Latino communities.

True the Vote, a Houston-based group that says it is training thousands of poll-watchers across the country, recently announced a new “Voto Honesto” initiative.

“People need to know it’s a crime if you try to vote when you’re not a citizen,” said Adryana Boyne, a conservative activist and Latina spokesperson for the Republican Party of Texas. Boyne is leading Voto Honesto — which means Honest Vote.

“Certainly the Latino community has to be informed that there is voter fraud, too,” she said.

Boyne said Voto Honesto will include voter education — encouraging Latinos to vote — as well as training poll-watchers to detect voter fraud. “We’re not keeping people from voting, we’re keeping people from cheating, which is different. And I think that is absolutely right to do,” she said.

Boyne was also insistent that the buying and selling of votes — in exchange for money or other things of value — is a major problem in certain places. She said this activity “is happening more in the minority community.”

As a result, Boyne said she is particularly motivated to remind Latinos that it is a federal crime to accept anything in exchange for a vote.

True the Vote’s outreach to the Latino community comes as right-wing groups have come under fire for unsupported rhetoric about voter fraud — with an emphasis on noncitizens — to support campaigns for Voter ID and other tactics that some have characterized as voter suppression.

“When you tie it all together, it’s all about the illegal alien vote,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said at a recent panel discussion. Fitton has also accused the Obama administration of trying to mobilize “the food stamp army.”

At the same panel, True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht bristled at charges of racism. “The race card doesn’t work anymore. It’s not true. There’s no there there,” she said.

But the fact remains that the suspicions of voter fraud activists tend to focus on two groups: residents of “urban areas” and “illegal aliens.”

Critics say those are euphemisms for blacks and Latinos generally, and suspect that poll-watchers from groups like True the Vote will be sent not to white, suburban precincts, but to predominately black and Latino ones, in an effort…

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This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.