Stephen Robert Morse was a freelance journalist and videographer working as a poll watcher for the local Republican Party in Philadelphia in 2008 when he got the call of his lifetime.
Members of the New Black Panther Party, he was told, were standing outside a polling place in an overwhelmingly African-American section of the city.
He shot a few minutes of video that day. One of the videos, showing two New Black Panther Party members standing outside of the polling place -- and one of them holding a nightstick -- went viral and was the underpinning of a voter intimidation case brought in the waning days of the Bush administration. That case has since exploded into a political controversy for the Obama Justice Department.
A second video shows cops showing up and taking the two men aside. But there was one part of the video that Election Journal, a website focusing on allegations of voter fraud run by a Republican strategist, didn't see fit to post. (Which contains the revelation that the videographer is no amateur, he calls himself a professional who came in from LA, and just happened to have a camera on hand while Republican operatives and the lawyer who submitted an affidavit to the Department of Justice were standing around)
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/poll_watcher_to_new_black_panther_party_videographer_dont_fk_up_the_story_video.php It's really funny that this video wasn't posted by the US Commission on Civil Rights until the report on this case was completed. Sounds like there should be some sort of investigation into this.
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