I gave you the rundown last night on the reporting we’ve been doing at TPMmuckraker on the Republican National Lawyers Association gearing up for Election Day and for more of its hyped claims about “voter fraud.”
Ground zero for the effort seems to be Illinois, where the RNLA is conducting several training sessions and where GOP Senate nominee Mark Kirk was caught on tape revealing that “voter integrity” squads would be targeting black and Latino neighborhoods.
One of the things that has emerged in the reporting so far is the deep involvement of the state Republican Party in this effort, but now it’s trying to hide its fingerprints in ways subtle and not.
To keep the effort under the radar, the party has teamed up with outside groups in the state to recruit volunteers, including a tea partying “birther,” as Suzy Khimm over at Mother Jones reports. But the party was apparently inadvertently too candid on its own website about the efforts, and has since scrubbed the earlier references to the RNLA’s training program. Also scrubbed: the party chair’s statement that “ballot integrity will be a key ingredient to our success.”
David Kurtz
David Kurtz is Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Talking Points Memo where he oversees the news operations of TPM and its sister sites.