Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Yahoo! News: Texas voter fraud activist leads closed-door poll watcher training at Arlington church

02.13.2024 / By Cody Copeland
Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Yahoo! News: Texas voter fraud activist leads closed-door poll watcher training at Arlington church

Such training sessions and the election day actions for which they prepare attendees are less about ensuring integrity in Texas elections than they are about voter intimidation, according to Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nongovernmental organization that works to expand voting rights. While he was unaware of what Pressley’s session was to cover, he said in a phone interview that such groups “seem to be going out of their way to use poll watchers to intimidate or at least harass voters of color in different parts of the states.” Gutierrez pointed to a 2021 video of a Harris County Republican Party presentation in which a man identifying with the county’s Republican Party said that they were trying to recruit an “army” of 10,000 poll workers to fight voter fraud. In the video, the presenter can be seen using a cursor to point to a predominantly white part of Houston. He says that they were looking to recruit people with “the confidence and courage to come down in here” — moving the cursor to predominantly Black and Brown communities — to fight voter fraud. Gutierrez expressed concern over the lack of transparency of Tuesday’s training session in Arlington. “If groups are kicking people out of their training, you have to wonder what they’re training people on,” he said.

Such training sessions and the election day actions for which they prepare attendees are less about ensuring integrity in Texas elections than they are about voter intimidation, according to Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nongovernmental organization that works to expand voting rights.

While he was unaware of what Pressley’s session was to cover, he said in a phone interview that such groups “seem to be going out of their way to use poll watchers to intimidate or at least harass voters of color in different parts of the states.”

Gutierrez pointed to a 2021 video of a Harris County Republican Party presentation in which a man identifying with the county’s Republican Party said that they were trying to recruit an “army” of 10,000 poll workers to fight voter fraud.

In the video, the presenter can be seen using a cursor to point to a predominantly white part of Houston. He says that they were looking to recruit people with “the confidence and courage to come down in here” — moving the cursor to predominantly Black and Brown communities — to fight voter fraud.

Gutierrez expressed concern over the lack of transparency of Tuesday’s training session in Arlington.

“If groups are kicking people out of their training, you have to wonder what they’re training people on,” he said.

 

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