Feds head for polls

Posted by Andrew Zajac at 5:23 a.m. CST

Justice Department officials announced Tuesday that they're deploying 800 federal workers, a record for a mid-term election, to watch over balloting for civil rights violations and fraud on Nov. 7.

About two-thirds of those are "observers" which means they are being sent to an area covered by the special enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, or by court order, and have the right to be present inside the polling area, according to Wan Kim, assistant attorney general for civil rights.

The remainder are "monitors" which means they can watch outside of a polling place, but depend on the cooperation of local authorities for permission to look around inside.

Personnel are being sent to "over 65 cities in approximately 20 states", with locations to be disclosed Monday, according to officials and a department fact sheet.

The size of the contingent is roughly double the complement for the last mid-term election in 2002, when 432 federal employees were posted to 26 counties in 14 states, according to an agency press release on the eve of that election.

Kim said that one factor in where people are sent is how close an election is expected to be, the theory being that it's more useful to be a deterrent to cheating when a few votes might decide the contest than it is to be on the scene of a blow-out.

Kim touts the big numbers as evidence of his division's aggressive enforcement of voting rights law. Enforcement in the Bush-era Justice Deparment is relatively broad, and includes language and racial discrimination cases as well as suits over states' failure to make computer-related upgrades required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Critics say that while these efforts are laudable, they give short shrift to racial discrimination, which, they assert, is still the biggest problem on the electoral fairness landscape.

And, they note, there is a political benefit to the Administration's enforcement strategy.

Hispanics, who might benefit from a language discrimination civil rights case, are less reliably Democratic voters than blacks, who would be prime beneficiaries of a racial discrmination case.

So, the critics say, if a Republican bureaucrat in a Republican administration has to make a decision about which eminently worthy case to pursue, which one's it going to be?