"When you talk about conservatives who rail against the supposed scourge of voter fraud and support voter identification laws that many expert say depress turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies, there's a few big names that invariably come up.
There's John Fund, the Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote an entire book on the matter. There's Hans von Spakovsky, the former Bush Justice Department official who supported allowing a voter ID law in Georgia to be cleared by the feds over the objections of career staffers in the Civil Rights Division voting section, who believed it could dilute the minority vote. There's Andrew Breitbart, the conservative behind the series of "Big" websites, who helped promote the undercover videos by James O'Keefe that brought down the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN).
All of them were at the first national conference of True the Vote this weekend, held at the swanky InterContinental Hotel in Houston, Texas. True the Vote, which was started by a Texas Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots, made it clear they intended to help groups around the country monitor the polls and make anti-voter fraud efforts a major part of the political landscape going into 2012.
A few consistent themes emerged from the speeches at the summit (which this reporter watched via a live stream from outside the room): that their efforts to preserve the integrity of elections weren't partisan, that they wanted everybody to be able to vote, and that suggestions that their efforts suppressed the vote of minorities were just unsubstantiated partisan attacks from the left. But the non-partisan theme was somewhat undercut by the partisan messages of the speakers and attacks on the Obama administration."
How can they claim that they are non-partisan? All associations in the political world are partisan; and it's nothing to be defensive about.
Remember, "voting turnout and activism means spreading the word!"
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