Voter Integrity Project

And by disseminating disinformation, it made liars out of a bunch of misguided volunteers, as well:

RALEIGH, NC–4:55 PM, Friday, April 12, 2013. Late this afternoon, we learned that some of our findings, revealed at the April 10 public Legislative hearing, may be inaccurate; so we plan to issue a full report after completing an audit. While we regret this human error and apologize for any embarrassment it may have caused to the presenters and to election officials, we caution the public against losing sight of the undeniable fact that North Carolina’s voter rolls are so corrupted that, without an effective voter ID law, it will be impossible to know who is really voting.

That's what's known as a logical leap: to admit your information is corrupted by inaccuracy, and then immediately follow that admission with a statement of "undeniable fact". This is not the first time DeLancey has been confounded by the truth:

VIP-NC Finds Dual Voters in FL & NC, according to the North Carolina chapter of the Voter Integrity Project.

(Raleigh, NC)—MAR 20, 2013—The NC State Board of Elections has confirmed their intent to prosecute five people on suspicion that they voted in both Florida and NC during the November 2012 election, according to email records provided by the Voter Integrity Project of NC, the group that investigated and identified the voters to both states’ election offices earlier last month.

The group initially identified what it thought were 33 potential instances of double voting. Of these, they classified "19 as 'highly likely,' six as 'probable' and eight as 'possible' vote fraud candidates." The NC Board of Elections, however, determined that several apparent instances of double voting were clerical errors. After a VIP-NC search consuming who knows how many man-hours, the NCBOE confirmed 5 for possible prosecution by matching signatures on voter rolls in NC and FL.

The so-called Voter Integrity Project is at it again, this time objecting to the vote of college students that appears to affect the election of Democrats at the local level. They seem to believe that if you don't own property locally you should not vote in local elections. They have an op-ed piece in the Durham Herald Sun. I posted some comments in their on-line version of this piece, opposing the article. Many BlueNC readers have taken note of the so-called work done by this group. They must be called out, often and loudly.

I encourage you to call them on their so-called desire to promote free and fair elections.

Fishing expedition comes back empty-handed:

Perry, who has been registered to vote in North Carolina since at least 1975, according to election records, was dismayed to receive a letter this month from the Wake County Board of Elections suggesting she may no longer be qualified to vote because she might be dead. "My initial reaction? I was mad as hell," Perry said Monday morning.

I would be mad as hell, too. What if she had been on vacation, or the letter got mixed up with some junk mail and accidentally tossed in file 13? Would her failure to respond have caused her name to be purged? And as far as this is concerned:

If the Voter Integrity Project were a registered voter its vote could be successfully challenged on the basis that it uses forms of address not recognized as valid by the US Postal Service, which can cause mail to be returned to senders as “Undeliverable”. This anomaly serves to highlight the dangers to voter access posed by various gratuitously strict matching requirements that have been proposed for forms of identity verification for in-person voting.

The right wing Voter Integrity Project, which has been challenging voter registrations in NC, uses an address form that gives the illusion of a physical address but which is actually a Private Mail Box (PMB) at a Raleigh UPS Store.

I think somebody needs to lay down and take a nap:

It’s not every day that a Wake County Elections Board hearing is the setting for a temper tantrum. That’s what happened today when the Voter Integrity Project’s Jay DeLancy snatched his microphone off the board’s table mid-meeting, kicking glass doors open in front of him as he stormed out of the meeting room in the Public Safety Center. He slowed down once he realized news cameras were chasing him.

Which was almost as embarassing as that time his mom had to drag him, kicking and screaming, down the aisle of the Winn Dixie because she had refused to allow Jay to put the box of Captain Crunch (with the prize inside) into her shopping cart.

But who's watching the watchers?

Wilson said the group’s objective is to have two observers at each polling place – an ambitious goal with 200 polling places in Wake County alone. “Observation changes behavior,” Wilson said. “This is where Voter Integrity comes in and that’s why it needs to be nonpartisan.”

You're damn right it changes behavior. It turns some people into vigilantes and others into potential suspects, and ushers in subjectivity based on appearance to a place that's supposed to be free of such.

Starting with a salvo of baseless challenges:

Jay DeLaney, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project, submitted 550 official challenges to the status of Wake County registered voters. In a preliminary hearing Tuesday members of the Wake County Board of Elections dismissed the challenges to more than 500 voter registrations while agreeing to further investigate 18 of them.

They actually started with 6,000 names, ending up with 18 "maybes". And now we follow the whitebread crumbs: