Last week, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released video showing Battleground Texas operative Jennifer Langoria admitting that the group uses its voter registration activities to conduct data-mining operations. It collects people’s personal information off of the voter registration forms it gets them to fill out, which is against state law governing the behavior of voter registrars in the state.
For a week, Democrat Wendy Davis has remained silent on the matter. The media in Texas have either clouded the issue or not asked her about it. Battleground Texas has defended the practice as legal.
But today, at the tail end of a Reuters infomercial on BGTX, the group admits that it has quietly scuttled the tactic. Reuters didn’t just bury the lead, it sunk it at the bottom of a trench.
O’Keefe released a video last week showing Battleground volunteers copying phone numbers from voter-registration forms they had collected from residents, which Republicans say violated state law.
Brown said it was legal, but added that Battleground had discontinued the practice before the video came out.
“We decided to change it because the law was unclear and we knew attacks would be coming at some point,” she said.
Unclear? Not really. Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has called for the group to be investigated, but complicating that, the state attorney general’s office would be in charge of such an investigation. Texas’ attorney general is Greg Abbott, the Republican front-runner for governor. His opponent, Wendy Davis, is allied to Battleground Texas. Any state investigation would very likely have Democrats all over the country mischaracterizing it as a witch hunt and casting Davis and BGTX as the victims — not the perpetrators.
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