HOUSTON, Texas — Last week, the nation learned about True The Vote, a Houston-based tea party group that fans out to heavily-minority precincts and challenges voters’ ballots.

As they work to suppress voters this election, across town, a far different story was unfolding: scores of volunteers fanning out not to stop people from voting, but to help them vote.

ThinkProgress was on the ground for the first annual National Voter Registration Day, a nationwide event for grassroots groups to help register voters. (The day was designed to take place prior to October 6, when Texas and a handful of other states have their registration deadline.) We attended numerous events throughout the day, including a radio-hyped registration table outside a breakfast diner, a hip-hop concert where tickets were distributed to those who registered and/or pledged to vote, and a comedy show where the comic interspersed jokes with pleas for young folks to get out and vote.

Watch a short video with highlights from the day:

Last year, Texas passed some of the worst anti-voter legislation of any state in the country. They enacted a voter ID law, which allowed voters to bring a gun license to the polls but not a student ID; it has since been blocked by the Department of Justice. In addition, they are on the leading edge of states passing new, onerous restrictions on voter registration groups like the League of Women Voters.

Still, despite the new regulations making their job more difficult, voter registration groups were out in full force Tuesday, doing their best to get as many people as possible registered to vote.

A police officer in Houston shot and killed a man on Saturday, claiming that the man was threatening them and that he “[f]ear[ed] for his partner’s safety and his own safety” at the time of the shooting. The circumstances of the shooting, however, raise serious questions about just how threatening the shooting victim could have been:

A Houston police officer shot and killed a one-armed, one-legged man in a wheelchair Saturday inside a group home after police say the double amputee threatened the officer and aggressively waved a metal object that turned out to be a pen. . . . [Police spokeswoman Jodi Silva] said the man came “within inches to a foot” of the officer and did not follow instructions to calm down and remain still.

“Fearing for his partner’s safety and his own safety, he discharged his weapon,” Silva told The Associated Press.

Police did not immediately release the name of the man who was killed. They had been called to the home after a caretaker there called and reported that the man in wheelchair was causing a disturbance.

The owner of the group home, John Garcia, told the Houston Chronicle that the man had a history of mental illness and had been living at the house about 18 months. Garcia said the man had told him that he lost a leg above the knee and all of one arm when he was hit by a train.

This is not the first example of Houston police using a questionable amount of force against a mentally ill suspect. A 2007 study determined that Houston police unnecessarily used Tasers on the mentally ill, even when police were warned about the person’s mental health condition.