“You could see democracy at its best,” said Munoz, 57, a Kenner resident and Army reservist who was part of the U.S. military contingent that helped Iraqi forces conduct the elections last year.

Munoz has a special perspective on elections, because in addition to his work overseas he also has been an elections commissioner in Kenner for about seven years. Stateside, he helps voters check in on election day.

In Iraq he watched voters triumphantly display inked fingers to prove they had voted. He talked with Iraqis in the months following the election to gauge their reactions. They had been nervous, he said, but excited to vote, some for the first time.

“To me it was a joyous event because I saw people doing what they had always wanted to do,” he said.

Here, voters don’t go to the polls under protection of soldiers holding machine guns. But having seen it both ways, Munoz said he is disappointed in the sometimes paltry turnout back home.

“The big difference is that I find here in the United States, we take everything for granted,” he said. “We are great at criticizing and finding the faults in people but aren’t great at doing something about it by going to vote.”

Earlier this year, Republican Secretary of State Dianna Durán said she found 37 cases of foreign nationals, including illegal immigrants, who may have cast ballots in New Mexico.  That came as she was verifying registrations for people without Social Security numbers who received New Mexico driver’s licenses.

“The public record provides critical evidence that noncitizens with and without driver’s licenses have registered to vote and that noncitizens have voted in New Mexico elections,” Durán told News 13 in March.

And Durán was quoted as saying: 

“To those who say that vote fraud (if it does exist) is ‘insignificant,’ our answer is that no instance of vote fraud, or ineligible registration, or ineligible voting, is now, or ever will be ‘insignificant’ to this office,” said Durán in the report. “Every single vote cast by an ineligible voter cancels and invalidates a vote cast by a legal voter and leaves that law-abiding citizen completely disenfranchised.”

This afternoon the State Board was informed by Robert Carey, Director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) of the Department of Defense, that the Department of Defense has denied the New York State 2012 Primary Election and General Election Waiver Application. The waiver sought exemption from certain provisions of the Military and Overseas Voting (MOVE) Act that affect the 2012 Primary Election for federal offices to be conducted as currently provided by the New York Election Law on September 11, 2012.

The denial means that the litigation in Federal Court in the Northern District will go forward. The Court is scheduled to rule after December 1st on the US Department of Justice’s motion to compel New York State to comply with the MOVE Act requirement to transmit ballots to military and overseas voters not later than 45 days before election day for federal office rather than the 32 day deadline currently provided for in state statute. The motion, if so ordered, would require moving primary date for federal office to take place not later than August 18, 2012.

The proposed interim map appears to have most heavily impacted state House districts in the Houston area.

Republicans could lose as many as three Houston-area seats under the court’s proposed map, which also undid the Legislature’s merger of two majority-minority districts that are represented by Democrats.

The Legislature’s merger of Democrats Scott Hochberg and Hubert Vo’s southwest Houston districts was one of the items that Justice Department’s lawyers identified as a Voting Rights Act violation.

The proposed House, which was endorsed by two of the three judges, also would place Republican Reps. Beverly Wooley and Rep. Jim Murphy into a single district.

“I don’t think the Democratic Party could have hoped to have a plan drawn like this if they controlled the Legislature,” said Paul Bettencourt, a former executive with the state Republican Party and former Harris County tax assessor.

“To complement the voter suppression efforts, tea party-affiliated groups such as the Houston-based King Street Patriots have vowed to send individuals to observe activities at polling places, which could intimidate voters. Hundreds of volunteers have pledged their time to travel to polling stations, question the rights of fellow Texans to cast their ballots and disrupt polling-place activity if they deem it necessary. The idea of tea party volunteers storming polling places evokes strong images of Jim Crow-era voter suppression.”

As someone who grew up in the middle of the civil rights movement in the 60′s in Jackson Mississippi, that last sentence made my blood boil. The Democrat’s Jim Crow laws were specifically directed at preventing African Americans to vote. To compare that to people who are simply poll watchers (most grandmothers and grandfathers, who could not care less about the color of skin), is despicable, and Judith Browne and Christina Sanders should be ashamed. To compare these good people to that time period diminishes what our great civil rights leaders fought against. It diminishes true racism. How do we teach our children what true racism is, when we point to things like this, where there is no racism? Our children start to think either everything is racist, or nothing is. And that is simply wrong.

There is a reason the King Street Patriots started True the Vote. Notwithstanding the overt corruption of ACORN and their voter registration fraud, the Patriots had seen it themselves here when they began in Houston in 2009. They saw Election Officials fail to check voters’ identification, and disregard polling documentation requirements. They saw these officials routinely accompany voters to the voting booth telling them who they should vote for, and even voting FOR THEM. All these things are against election laws. There is a reason we have poll watchers. But in so many districts, no one has volunteered to monitor, and all these violations have been ignored.

These things don’t just happen in black neighborhoods, they happen everywhere, and they need to be monitored everywhere. Not one of the King Street Patriots intimidated anyone, nor did they wish to. All they wanted and want is for the laws to be obeyed