***updated with more info***

The Wall Street Journal reports on a “new breed” of poll watchers who will be out in full force tomorrow. Beware. Behind the civic-minded facade are far Left radicals whose main conern is not in ensuring a fair election process–but in preemptively undermining and delegitimizing it:

When Americans go to vote tomorrow, a new breed of activist will be on guard, monitoring polling stations for everything from voting-machine glitches to long lines to registration snafus.

Energized by disputed results in 2000 and 2004, they have left jobs as music conductors, real-estate agents and software engineers to form groups that expect to turn out thousands of volunteers who don’t trust the country’s ability to count its votes and have decided to do something about it…

Many of the groups share liberal roots, their members smarting from the narrow Democratic losses in the last two presidential elections…

…Two of the bigger groups — the Election Protection Coalition and Voter Action — will staff call centers where they will field voter complaints to their 866-OUR-VOTE and 888-SAV-VOTE numbers and dispatch lawyers to any trouble spots. Video the Vote is enlisting “citizen journalists” to film polling-place problems. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and People for the American Way are among Election Protection’s members. Voter Action is a legal-rights group started by California lawyer Lowell Finley, who sued voting-machine maker Diebold Inc. over software security; Diebold recently paid $2.6 million to California as part of a settlement of the suit.

Pollworkers for Democracy — a joint project of VoteTrustUSA, and two groups who often support progressive causes, Mainstreet Moms and Working Assets — is asking election workers to report voting problems to the group after finishing their precinct shifts to provide evidence for potential lawsuits and recounts. And dozens of small, grass-roots groups will be watching polling stations, elections offices and tabulation centers…

I surfed over to the Video The Vote website, which has the endorsement of John Kerry’s people. Take a bit of time to find out more about the organizers and their Election Day plans. They’ll be in your neighborhoods and someone has to watch the watchers:

Welcome to Video the Vote. Our goal is to protect the vote by being the eyes and ears where ballots are cast and counted on Election Day. We will document and report any irregularities that occur at polling places and boards of elections while they are happening, enabling the media and public to watch-dog the electoral process across our country.

Video the Vote was created by Ian Inaba of the Guerrilla News Network, John Ennis of Shoot First, and James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org. The three originally sought to provide a platform to help independent filmmakers coordinate their efforts on election day—documenting election problems and pushing those stories into the mainstream media. The idea morphed into a populist program where ordinary people could participate. They’d simply agree to be on-call to document any Election Day problems that arise in their area; the only requirements being having a digital video recorder, a cell phone, and broadband Internet access, and agreeing to respect governing election law.

Since starting, several organizations have partnered with us to make Video the Vote a success, namely Common Cause, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, The League of Young Voters Education Fund, People for the American Way Foundation, and Rock the Vote.

Rucker is targeting Ward Connerly’s anti-racial preference initiative in Michigan and is a Bush-bashing race card player. The Guerrilla News Network is a 24/7 Internet TV station with wall-to-wall BDS programming. Inaba is a diehard fan of Cynthia McKinney and black box conspiracies. Here’s a bit of his work–an excerpt from “American Blackout:”

If these guerrilla activists act anything like left-wing dKos disrupter Mike Stark, we’re in for trouble.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I suggest bringing your own video camera to the polls.

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Publia wonders why the left-wing lawyers behind the effort aren’t more concerned about privacy.

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Update:

The supposedly “non-partisan” Election Protection outfit is a project of the left-wing People for the American Way Foundation.

They’ve recruited some 3,000 college students in Chicago and Cook County, Ill. “to serve as nonpartisan election judges and election administrators for the November 7 election.”

Here’s a good background paper on liberal advocacy groups from the Capital Research Center, which warned about how “nonpartisan” civic groups worked in 2004 to ensure a partisan, anti-Bush, anti-GOP outcome.

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The Dems’ preemptive delegitimization plan

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