By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS Staff Journalist A small group of citizen watchdogs uncovered evidence of massive voter fraud in Texas during the 2008 election, and their findings are now in the hands of the Texas Secretary of State. Fox News is reporting that a woman named Catherine Engelbrecht and a few of her friends from Houston decided to get more involved in the political process and volunteered to work at the city's polling places during the 2008 election. “What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.” They decided to form a new group, “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization, and began collecting publicly available voting data to see how extensive the problem was. "It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers. They started out by investigating voter fraud in general, not just at polling places, and figured out how to do it as they went along. “The first thing we started to do was look at houses with more than six voters in them," Engelbrecht said. "Most voting districts had 1,800 if they were Republican and 2,400 of these houses if they were Democratic . . . But we came across one with 24,000, and that was where we started looking." A lot of the evidence showed up in a poor and predominantly black district, which has led some to accuse the group of targeting minorities, but Engelbrecht flatly rejects that accusation. "It had nothing to do with politics. It was just the numbers.” When the task became overwhelming, they put out a call for help and quickly received 30 donated computers and "tens of thousands of hours" of volunteer work. Their persistence paid off. They found vacant lots that had several voters registered to them. An eight-bed halfway house had 40 voters registered at its address. One woman registered six times in the same day. There were registrations from non-citizens and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures. The group decided it was time to see who was registering all these phony voters and discovered that most of them were related to a group known as Houston Votes which is headed by Sean Caddle, who also works for the Service Employees International Union. When they completed their work, they found that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. Two weeks ago, the Harris County voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, took their work, along with findings of his own, and turned it over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney. "The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes," Vasquez said. He has since been asked by the District Attorney's office to refrain from commenting to the press about the case. Meanwhile, Caddle told local newspapers that there had been "mistakes" made and that he had fired 30 workers for filing defective voter registration applications. In a bizarre twist of fate, shortly after Vasquez turned over his materials, a three-alarm fire destroyed almost all of Harris County's voting machines, which has left the upcoming Nov. 2 election in turmoil as election officials scramble to come up with a whole new voting system in a matter  of a few weeks. © All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace®  http://www.womenofgrace.com