The Justice Department will send out fewer election observers this year due to the Supreme Court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act, a move that could make it harder for the department to detect voter intimidation and other problems at the polls.
According to the Associated Press, the department still hopes to have hundreds of staffers at the polls nationwide and have them in at least as many states as they had them in during the 2012 election. During the last presidential cycle, the Justice Department had more than 720 staffers in 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 added that there’s no way to “sugar coat” the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder opinion, which ruled Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 unconstitutional.
Section 4 mandated how the Justice Department could enforce Section 5, which requires states and districts identified as historically discriminatory to get the federal government’s approval to make changes to their election law. The court’s objection to Section 4 was that the list of states and districts that were identified were out of date.
Most of the DOJ staffers sent out this year will be identified as “election monitors.” However, they will have less authority than election observers and have to rely on the cooperation of local officials.
“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.”
