United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum)
The Tea Party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.
This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]
True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston Tea Party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”
The Independent reported back in March that the group was a 501(c)4 nonprofit and had applied for 501(c)3 nonprofit status.
Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of King Street Patriots, said during the group’s summit that she was hoping to mobilize teams of three people to oversee each voting precinct in the country. That would add up to roughly 1 million right-wing tea party volunteers nationwide by the 2012 general election, the Independent reported.
Tea Party Manatee, based in Southwest Florida, sent out an email newsletter this week, echoing the King Street Patriots’ latest fight and warning that the U.N. is “trying to Intervene in 2012 Elections.”
According to group’s email:
- In November 2012 Foreign bureaucrats will appear at your polling station to ensure you adhere to their vision of a ‘fair’ election.
- Local polling officials who dare to enforce state clean election laws will be subject to lawsuits and arrest.
- Conservative political speech will be deemed hateful and be suppressed.
- Just enough voter fraud will be allowed to ensure a second term for Barack Hussein Obama.
This is not a fantasy – next week it will start to become reality when a delegation of leftist Obama supporters will meet with the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. And there they will lay the groundwork to ensure the United Nations takes action in time to save Barack Obama.
You see, the Democratic Left is terrified of the new clean election laws being passed across America. These laws have cleared our voter lists of the dead and the ineligible, require voter identification for everyone and insist that our military be allowed to vote.
And clean elections are the single greatest weapon we have to ensure an honest vote in 2012 and a single term for Barack Obama. And the Left can’t allow that to happen.
So they will make their case for action to the UN Human Rights Council – an international government origination so biased that even Hillary Clinton has denounced it.
Council members like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mexico and China will review your election laws and judge if you measure up to their idea of democracy. How can we accomplish any of our goals, like repealing health care rationing, securing the borders and balancing our budget if we can’t even control our own elections?
That’s why we need to send a clear message to the UN – stay out of America’s elections and abandon Barack Obama to the judgment of the American people. I need you to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send that very message to the United Nations – by any means necessary.
It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of this particular hysteria, but one of the earliest mentions of the NAACP’s plan to involve the U.N. came in a report by Fox News.
The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to intervene as it claims state governments are colluding to “block the vote” for minority communities ahead of the 2012 election — a charge those governments vehemently deny.
The nation’s biggest civil rights organization this week released a report that claimed a raft of new voting laws at the state level would disenfranchise minority voters. The report said 14 states passed 25 measures “designed to restrict or limit the ballot access of voters of color.”
…
Supporters of the laws describe them as common-sense measures meant to ensure the integrity of elections. In Tennessee, which is implementing a new photo ID law, elections coordinator Mark Goins dismissed the criticism and questioned why the NAACP would flag the United Nations over its concerns, calling that effort “a bit extreme.”
“I don’t know what the benefit of going to the U.N. would be,” he said. “I can’t imagine any authority whatsoever that they would have here in Tennessee.”
But the NAACP described the new measures as part of a “concerted” effort to drive down minority turnout and is planning a multi-stage campaign to attract international attention.
To start, the group is planning a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally this Saturday across from the U.N. headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which, among other demands, calls on the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.”
Copies of the latest report are being sent to the United Nations, as well as attorneys general across the country and the Department of Justice. According to one newspaper report, the NAACP will follow up in March when it sends a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to present its case before the U.N. Human Rights Council — a group known more for its sustained criticism of Israel than its attention to voting rights.
An NAACP spokesman says the organization is just doing its duty as one of the 3,500 groups that “has consulting status” with the U.N. The group simply works with the international organization to make sure the United States is “living up to its commitment” to an initiative to eliminate discrimination, the spokesperson says.
He also says that the U.N. does not have the power to actually intervene in state matters, and can only interview people and create reports through the Human Rights Council.
“We are just working to make sure the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy,” the NAACP spokesperson says.
The NAACP will be giving a presentation in Geneva to the Human Rights Council in March 2012 as part of its consulting status.
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