The Washington Post reports today that the federal government's routine election monitoring—in place since 1965—is in trouble. Thanks to the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the Justice Department can only enter polling places with permission from state officials—and Republican states are increasingly denying them that permission.
That's a problem. But they also say this:
Legal experts said the federal government lost significant legal recourse in 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.... Since then, the number of federal observers has dropped significantly, said Katherine Culliton-González, a former Justice Department monitor and former Biden administration official.
Naturally I wanted to check this. I couldn't find historical data for the number of observers, but I did find data for the number of jurisdictions monitored in elections going back to 2004. Here it is:
It sure looks like monitoring declined in the decade before the Supreme Court's decision and then increased after the decision.
In any case, the Justice Department only monitors about 50 jurisdictions out of thousands each election. And the only change is that observers have to stay outside instead of watching from inside the polling center. They aren't gone entirely. In the end, Republican interference is stupid and paranoid but probably doesn't have a very significant effect.
As someone who has volunteered to election monitor for Democrats, and thus generally had to monitor polls from outside instead of inside, that difference strikes me as potentially huge. As an outside monitor, we mostly could only try to assist voters by answering questions, providing contacts for complaints, identifying the correct polling place for people who didn't know, and providing advice on how to move quickly through the inside process (in 2004 our pre-organization seemed to cut down wait times from 3 hours at the beginning of the day to about 45 minutes by the end because the inside was in such chaos, but we organized people according to what we were hearing from inside in a way that helped address it). But we really didn't have a good sense of what was going on inside, and if there were irregularities, it would have been very hard to observe them. And in at least one of those situations (again, 2004), I saw and heard weird stuff that seemed questionable, but as an outsider, I really had no way of knowing if anything was really going wrong. It seems pretty clear that being able to observe the process would allow one to oversee it in a way that just hearing about it secondhand wouldn't. None of that is as an official monitor for the government, but that was my observation as a volunteer.
Thanks, RobS. I was going to point out that from outside the polling place, observers can't actually, you know... _observe_ anything in the polling place. So numbers of "observers" doesn't matter if they can't do their jobs.
And you provided a detailed account of the limits of what you as a monitor have been able to do without access to the polling place. Thanks for that!
The number of people doing the work seems pretty important.
As does access to the building where the action in need of monitoring is actually occurring.
Dismissing these two factors and moving the goalposts is...well....whats the point here?
Without data on distribution, this curve doesn’t tell us much. They are monitoring 50 jurisdictions, but if that increase is loaded into fewer districts, plus restricted to outside where you can’t observe anything, the corrupt partisan hacks on SCOTUS effectively ended meaningful observation.
There we a couple of incidents that happened over the past two days in the Philadelphia suburbs that are worth noting.
"In the lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the Trump campaign along with Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick and the Republican National Committee said a county office sent voters home on Tuesday who formed long lines ahead of a 5 p.m. deadline to apply for a mail-in ballot."
https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-orders-pennsylvania-county-extend-mail-ballot-deadline-after-trump-lawsuit-2024-10-30/
The deadline was 10/29 at 5pm but the judge extended the deadline to Friday.
A trump delegate was arrested in Delaware County for disruptive and belligerent behavior related to trying to influence voters.
"Asked to comment, Ryan Herlinger, a spokesperson for Delaware County said, “On Monday, October 28, 2024, an incident occurred at the Voter Service Center located at the Government Center Building in Media, PA, resulting in the arrest and removal of a woman who, according to multiple eyewitnesses, was disruptive, belligerent, and attempting to influence voters waiting in line. Her behavior prompted several complaints from those in line. Delaware County Park Police—who provide security for the Government Center Building—were on-site and responded promptly to the disturbance.”
https://delawarevalleyjournal.com/rnc-trump-delegate-arrested-in-delco-for-encouraging-voters-to-stay-in-line/
I truly believe that these incidents will lead to trump and the RNC to challenge the results in Pennsylvania if he loses.
So what's worse? Democrats not being able to monitor election workers from the inside, or Republicans being able to monitor (i.e. intimidate) election workers from the inside?
Sounds like this can be spun either way.