Abbott at it again: **Texas Prosecutes Little Old Ladies for Voter Fraud**

Willie Ray was a 69-year-old African-American City Council member from Texarkana who wanted her granddaughter, Jamillah Johnson, to learn about civil rights and voting during the 2004 presidential election. The pair helped homebound seniors citizens get absentee ballots, and once they were filled out, put them in the mail.

Fort Worth's Gloria Meeks, 69, was a church-going, community activist who proudly ran a phone bank and helped homebound elderly people like Parthenia McDonald, 79, to vote by mail. McDonald, whose mailbox was two blocks away from her home (she recently died), called Meeks "an angel" for helping her, a friend of both women said.

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But Texas Democrats, such as Lisa Turner of the Lone Star Project, onestarproject.net a political action committee that first exposed Abbott's prosecutions, issued reports on it and maintains a staff to fight voter suppression in the state, said Abbott's goal is not merely to prosecute little old ladies. Rather, Turner said it was to send a message to Texas' minority communities, which lean Democratic, by sowing fears among the elderly about voting by mail.

"It's the equivalent if when a gang moves into a neighborhood and spray paints their graffiti or their marker; it's not to deface one building. It is to send a message," Turner said. "You have agents of the attorney general, walking through a neighborhood, walking past three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does that say their priorities are? It's about holding onto the levers of power."

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Despite Abbott's repeated declarations nobody is above Texas law, he has prosecuted no Republicans.

"What is especially troubling is that while Greg Abbott's office has prosecuted minority seniors for simply mailing ballots, he has not prosecuted anyone on the other side of the aisle for what appear to be open and shut cases of real voter fraud," Hebert told Texas House Elections Committee, on January 25, 2008, as the panel held a hearing on a bill making the state's voter I.D. laws tougher.

Hebert cited a 2005 election in Highland Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country with hundreds of million-dollar homes and where both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lived before the 2000 election. In 2005, two election judges, both Republicans, and a 10-year-old boy handed out over 100 ballots, Hebert testified, without checking any voter registration cards or IDs. The ballots were filled out and turned in, he said, quoting from several Dallas District Attorney memos that suggested there was a strong basis for prosecuting the judges for not following procedures and counting "over 100 more ballots" that there were "signatures on the roster."

More:

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/80589


I wish DVO's would have beat this creep. Perhaps he did but Abbott had his ballot box stuffed in his favor.:grr: