A Texas-based Tea Party organization and the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections have agreed on a plan to provide the group access to county voting records from the 2012 federal election and voter registration and other records going back to 2009.
Planning an audit "unprecedented in that it will be led not by government entities or political parties, but by concerned citizens," the organization, True the Vote, said in a news release that it can now begin "reconstruction and review" of the congressional race between confessed torturer Allen West and Congressman Patrick Murphy to understand "exactly what happened before, during and after" the race. (We can tell them what happened: West lost.)
The agreement is part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed in February by True the Vote and Florida Tea Party leader Pamela Wohlschlegel against St. Lucie Supervisor of Elections Gertrude Walker.
The suit alleged that Walker's refusal to provide the Tea Party access to voting records during the postelection recount of the West-Murphy race violated the National Voter Registration Act and Florida public records laws and injured Florida Tea Party members by "undermining their confidence in the integrity of the electoral process and the effectiveness of their vote." (Losing an election tends to do that.)
True the Vote claims to be "the nation's leading voters' rights organization." (A more accurate description would be "the nation's leading white, GOP voter's rights organization.") Its horror stories of persistent, widespread (liberal Democratic) voter fraud are bogus; its chief victories have consisted of the suppression of poor and minority votes; its leadership is deluded.
An election is a messy affair — as is any human enterprise of similar size and complexity. We're sure TTV will come across irregularities and anomalies as it burrows through the files and just as sure it'll regularly pop back up into daylight screaming "We wuz robbed!"
