Months before the conservative vote-monitoring group Judicial Watch filed to intervene in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against North Carolina’s restrictive new voting law, which includes a photo ID requirement, its counterparts at the Houston-based poll-monitoring nonprofit True the Vote filed the same for the Texas voter ID trial, which also involves the Justice Department. True the Vote filed its intervention plea back in September, arguing that a ruling striking down Texas’ voter ID law would “frustrate and hamper” the organization’s anti-voter fraud efforts. Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of the U.S. District Court of Southern Texas didn’t buy it and last week denied True the Vote’s motion. “The Court finds that True the Vote’s intended contribution to this case may be accomplished without the necessity of, or burden incident to, making it a party,” wrote Judge Ramos.
True the Vote is appealing the decision. It may still participate in the case by submitting an amicus brief in support of Texas maintaining its voter ID law.
The organization, which has been accused of voter intimidation, also attempted to intervene last year in a Florida voting rights case that was brought by the Justice Department against the state’s program to purge voter rolls. Filing in support of the purges, True the Vote was joined by Judicial Watch as part of their “Election Integrity Project,” which purports to promote voter “list maintenance” — the scrubbing of allegedly ineligible voters’ names from rolls — to boost voter confidence. The federal judge in Florida denied the duo’s request to intervene in that case as well.
In all three cases — Florida last year and North Carolina and Texas this year — Judicial Watch and True the Vote have claimed that the states’ attorneys could not adequately represent the interests of all registered voters. Specifically, the organizations claim they possess a wealth of voter data from their own digging through state and county registration records that the states do not have. This exclusive data contains proof that non-citizens and dead people had either been registered to vote or voted, according to the intervention motions.
Full Article: True the Vote denied entry into Texas voter ID trial.
