The Justice Department sent about 1,000 election monitors and observers to all 50 states on Tuesday — its largest monitoring effort ever, the department said. In this area, they watched the polls in Fairfax County and Prince William County in Virginia and in Prince George’s County in Maryland. One of those counties let them in. One kept them outside.
What election monitors do
The federal government has sent election monitors since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Their job is to watch and take notes: are the voting laws being followed, can voters with disabilities get in, are ballots handled the right way? They are unarmed civilians — Justice Department staff, other federal employees and observers from the Office of Personnel Management. In Virginia they may see and hear what happens at the polls, but they may not question voters or poll workers or demand information, and they may not wander around the room.
Three counties, three answers
Fairfax County agreed to let the monitors inside its polling places as neutral observers. Fairfax and Prince William both hosted federal observers during the August primaries, with no reported problems.
Prince William County said no to inside access. Its registrar, Eric Olsen, set out the refusal in an email to the department reported on Oct. 29. He said the request came too close to the election, the county had shown no evidence of breaking civil-rights law, and he wanted to avoid what he called “inappropriate federal intervention.” He also wrote that he “cannot be confident the observers sent will have the training, temperament, and expertise.” A Justice Department spokeswoman, Kiersten Pels, said the department would follow state rules requiring its monitors to stand back from polling places. The monitors could still watch from outside; it was not clear late Tuesday whether any were present outside a Prince William polling place on Election Day.
Virginia Beach went further: its electoral board voted on Oct. 30 to keep all neutral observers — the Justice Department’s and the NAACP’s alike — outside polling places, beyond the 40-foot line where campaigning also stops.
In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the monitors wore plain clothes, stood in set observation areas, and were barred from speaking to voters or pressuring them inside polling places.
The argument behind it
On Oct. 15, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones and the state elections department sent local officials a 10-page guide on federal agents at the polls. It told them to call the police if agents approach or enter a polling place and to write down what the agents do. The Justice Department answered that the guide attacks a “strawman” and is “political posturing,” saying its people would do “the routine monitoring we’ve done for decades.”
Three different things
Readers may hear these stories mixed together tonight, so here is the difference. Election monitors are unarmed civilians who watch and take notes — a practice older than most voters. Armed troops or agents standing near a polling place are a separate matter, and federal law bans them there. And the Justice Department’s demands this fall that states hand over voter lists or set ballots aside are a third matter, now before the courts. They are not the same thing, and this story is only about the first.
