DOJ Monitors Election Day To Guard Against Voter Suppression
Today is the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, or election day as the U.S. Congress calls it. There is voting going on across the country — from gubernatorial races to local and county elections and, in Texas, state level amendment matters.
This is not the type of election day that get the masses of voters excited about going to the polls, we’re not electing a president today. Nonetheless, the U.S. Justice department isn’t taking any chances. According to CNN:
Federal civil rights officials announced Monday they have sent election observers to locations in five states to keep an eye out for potential trouble at the polls Tuesday.
Potential trouble? They must mean all of those voter fraud people, lying about who they are because no one asks them for ID when they vote. Surly they mean the hordes of undocumented people with fake identification who take advantage of our country’s benevolence and who stand in line on election day to exercise a right that isn’t theirs.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division dispatched 11 staff attorneys along with 85 trained election observers from the Office of Personnel Management to watch activities at the polls and report any irregularities.
And by irregularities they mean:
- monitors have been sent to 4 counties Mississippi where governor Haley Barbour is term-limited from running again. The DOJ sent 11 monitors there for the primary elections in August. Their job is to make sure that voters aren’t kept from the polls.
- monitors were assigned to Lorain County, Ohio, according to CNN “to protect the rights of Spanish-speaking voters. Last month, the federal government signed an agreement with Lorain County to resolve concerns that limited-English Hispanic voters were being denied their full voting rights because the county failed to provide language assistance as required by law.”
- in Alameda County, California, monitors will be there as part of an agreement between federal officials and the county, that Alameda County to provide election materials and information in Spanish and Chinese. According to Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez the agreement “ensures that Alameda County’s Spanish- and Chinese-speaking citizens will be able to cast an effective ballot and successfully participate in the electoral process.”
- in Jasper, Texas,the monitors were called-in because of racial tensions after the recall of 3 African-American city council members who are responsible for the hiring of the city’s first African-American police chief.
- and in Springfield, Massachusetts, onitors were sent in response to claims by Hispanic leaders, the NAACP and ACLU that minority voters were turned away from the polls in September primary. Also, they claim there was no assistance for Spanish-language voters.
Not one, not a single monitor was sent out this election day to fight voter fraud. On the contrary, election observers were sent to protect the rights of minority voters where there is either a history of or reason to suspect voter suppression.
This puts the calls for voter ID in a realistic perspective. NewsTaco has kept a close eye on the calls for voter ID that have proliferated across the country; how they claim to guard against voter fraud when the incidences of fraud are less than negligible; how the law’s’ true effect is to disenfranchise elderly, student, minority and poor voters. And all the while the real problem is not fraud, it’s suppression. And not much reporting goes to this fact.
Today there will be a contingent of federal officials spread across the country to look after the rights of American voters. Maybe there should be more; maybe they should be dispatched to the states that have enacted voter ID, to make sure that those laws aren’t being used to keep people from voting.
[Image By Daquella Manera]