US cuts number of observers at the polls

Associated Press

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.