Dave Weigel has the right takeaway from Suzy Khimm's reporting on so-called election protection efforts from conservative groups, which advise their members to skirt the law by videotaping polling stations:
Let's say that no actual election fraud is captured, and no voters are scared away by aggressive Tea Partiers. The benefit of this sort of election-watching is enormous anyway, because it was exactly this -- a videoblogger for the little-known Election Journal -- that produced 23 months of scandal over two idiots from the New Black Panther Party skulking outside of a Philadelphia polling booth. Expect numerous stories of "union thugs" or otherwise scary activists defrauding the vote on November 2; expect a new Republican Congress to investigate them.
Important to remember that not a single voter has every claimed to have been intimidated by the NBPP incident, but the event nevertheless prompted one outside investigation from the conservative dominated U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and one internal investigation from the Justice Department's inspector general. It really doesn't take much.
