In Texas, white "poll watchers" are intimidating minority voters. There's a lot going on here:
White Entitlement: Who the hell do you think you are, that you are just entitled to follow some black person around and physically hover over them while they are voting?
White Privilege: If anyone hovered over me while I was voting, they would get one warning. If they persisted they would get pepper sprayed. As a white women, it would never even occur to me to tolerate this behavior. Yet in this country, people of color can still feel as if they want to avoid anything that will bring them to the attention of the authorities. They're still not treated equally by the cops.
Projection: This is as old as voting in our country. The systemic and institutionalized disenfranchisement of the minority voter. Teaparty groups are attempting to steal elections around our country, and while doing so they are screaming as loud as they can about a new black panther non-story. They are doing this to divert attention from their wide-spread fraud, but also because they just feel entitled to. It's different for them. They are the people who should be voting. Black people and Hispanic people are the people who shouldn't be voting.
Right Wing Machine: Will continue to gin up a non-controversy about the looming non-danger of the new black panthers. They will do this for two reasons; to attempt to convince white America that these white thugs and goons are freedom fighters who are just fighting back. And also because they hope to politically intimidate the Justice Dept into inaction against widespread white poll and election thuggery and fraud.
"TPM has obtained some of the threatening and racist emails that that voter registration group down in Houston received after being targeted by one Texas Tea Party group for alleged "voter fraud." It's about as ugly as you would expect: "The WAR is coming and we are going to dispose of each and every one of you while we take OUR (White) nation back."
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/10/the_better_angels_of_our_nature.php?ref=fpblg
Chad Dunn, a lawyer who is representing the Texas Democratic Party, told TPMMuckraker a number of witnesses have been interviewed by Civil Rights Division lawyers already. "We've gotten a number of reports -- quite a few out of the Houston area -- that poll watchers, King Street Patriot training poll watchers, are following a voter after they've checked them out and stand right behind them," Dunn said. There's at least a dozen reports that they could confirm with witnesses, he said. "Interestingly, it's all in the polling places in Hispanic and African-American areas," he added.
Terry O'Rourke, the first assistant in the Harris County Attorney's office, told TPMMuckraker that there have been allegations of poll watchers talking to voters, which they are not allowed to do, as well as hovering over voters as they are waiting to vote. He said the complaints came from Kashmere Gardens, Moody Park, Sunnyside and other predominantly minority neighborhoods of the county.
"There are far more poll watchers in this election than we've ever had before. The Republican Party has 300 poll watchers on their ready list," O'Rourke said. He can't say for certain that they are connected to the Tea Party. "None of the people who walk in the door have Tea Party buttons on," he said.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/the_texas_democratic_party_expanded.php
