Fewer election observers from the Justice Dept. at the polls

WASHINGTON >> Justice Department officials are warning that they’ll be dispatching fewer trained election observers as a result of a Supreme Court opinion that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

The reduction is likely to diminish the department’s ability to detect voter intimidation and other potential problems at the polls. It comes as more than a dozen states have adopted new voting and registration rules, and as Republican candidate Donald Trump warns without evidence that the Nov. 8 election will be rigged and exhorts his followers to be vigilant against unspecified fraud.

“It’s cause for concern,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “It’s hard to know ahead of time how significant a problem it’s going to be.”

Justice Department officials said they still will dispatch hundreds of staffers to the polls and expect to have them in at least as many states as during the 2012 election, when they sent more than 780 observers and department personnel to 23 states.

“We have been doing everything we can through our monitoring program to be able to be as effective as we can be” in ensuring fair elections, said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She said voters won’t detect any difference in the federal presence this year from the 2012 election.

But, Gupta added, there’s no way to “sugar coat” the impact of the court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder opinion, which invalidated a cornerstone of the 1965 voting law.

In a video released Wednesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that though the court’s decision had reined in the Justice Department’s power, the government would work to “ensure that every voter can cast his or her ballot free of unlawful intimidation, discrimination, or obstruction.”

The exact number of personnel will not be revealed until closer to Election Day.

Most of the staffers will be so-called election monitors, who have less authority than federally trained election observers and rely on the cooperation of local officials to do their jobs. Federal observers enjoy unfettered access inside polling places on Election Day and cannot be removed. Justice Department officials say they’ve been working with local election officials to secure cooperation for their monitors.

The federal observer program has provided an important safeguard during previous elections, especially in places that tried to suppress the votes of blacks, Latinos and other minorities, said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

In past elections, for example, observers were sent to Greensboro, Alabama, after white election officials tried to prevent black voters from entering polling places and to Pike County, Georgia, after an after-hours voter registration session was open to whites only, the Justice Department says.

Observers, and monitors too, have long been relied upon to defuse tensions, deter intimidation and encourage faith in the fairness of the electoral process.

“They have the imprimatur of the federal government behind them that is giving them the rights and responsibilities to be in polling places,” said Nicole Austin-Hillery, director and counsel of the Washington, D.C., office of the Brennan Center for Justice.

This year, as in past elections, the hundreds of monitors on the ground will responsible for making sure voters aren’t treated differently because of race or gender, that disabled voters are being accommodated and that voters who need them have bilingual election materials, Lynch said in her video message.

Still, this presidential election will be the first since the landmark Shelby County opinion. That ruling threw out a requirement that jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination, mostly in Southern states, seek approval from the federal government before changing the way they hold elections.