INSTITUTE INDEX: Watching the tea party poll watchers

Number of poll watchers that True the Vote, a Houston-based tea party organization, has said it plans to mobilize nationally for the upcoming election: 1 million

Year in which True the Vote was founded: 2009

Year in which Texans for Public Justice filed a complaint with the Texas ethics commission charging that True the Vote violated the violated the state's ban on corporate campaign contributions by making in-kind donations to Republican candidates and organizations: 2010

Date on which True the Vote, which says it's nonpartisan, made a contribution to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which works to elect GOP candidates to office: 8/17/2012

Amount of that contribution, which True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht has called a mistake: $5,000

Year in which True the Vote held its first national summit, where participants learned tactics for challenging voters at the polls: 2011

Date on which Jay DeLancy, a retired Air Force officer who attended the summit, formed the Voter Integrity Project in North Carolina after breaking off from True the Vote because it raised concerns about his anti-immigrant focus: 5/30/2012

Number of voters in Wake County, N.C., most of them people of color, whose registrations the Voter Integrity Project challenged unsuccessfully this past June: 500

Date on which the Voter Integrity Project presented to the N.C. Board of Elections a list of registered voters who it claimed were deceased: 8/31/2012

Number of names that were on that list: 30,000

Of those names, number that actually approximated those on the voter rolls in a manner close enough to warrant further investigation: 4,946

Number of people on the list who were found to have voted fraudulently: 0

Number of poll-watching volunteers that the North Carolina chapter of True the Vote, which Republican Party activist Donna Yowell took over after DeLancy's split, had recruited as of last month: 286

Of the 25 North Carolina counties with the highest level of African-American residents, number where True the Vote has volunteers: 24

Of the 10 North Carolina counties with the lowest level of African-American residents, number where true the vote has volunteers: 2

Date on which Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, launched an investigation of True the Vote with a letter asking the group to produce copies of correspondence, contracts and other documents: 10/4/2012

Date on which the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it will monitor early voting in Dallas and Harris County, Texas, True the Vote's home base, to ensure the Voting Rights Act is being followed: 10/19/2012

Date on which Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) threatened the international election monitoring group Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe with prosecution after it announced plans to observe voting in the state: 10/24/2012

Number of volunteers the Election Protection coalition, launched after the 2000 election fiasco in Florida, plans to recruit to help at the polls in 20 states, particularly in high-turnout minority voting areas and historically disenfranchised communities: 10,000

Number of call centers in English and Spanish the coalition will staff through its 866-OUR-VOTE hotline: 32

Rank of this election among the Election Protection coalition's biggest efforts so far as it tries to mitigate the chaos caused by True the Vote and other voter suppression efforts: 1

(Click on figure to go to source. Map showing True the Vote volunteers in relation to N.C. counties' African-American population from "Abridging the Vote: True the Vote in North Carolina," by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, Oct. 12, 2012. For a larger version, click here.)