'13 ruling to limit U.S. observers on Election Day

Kim Buckley, the Madison County, Tenn., elections administrator, checks a voter’s ID on Wednesday in Jackson on the first day of early voting in Tennessee.
Kim Buckley, the Madison County, Tenn., elections administrator, checks a voter’s ID on Wednesday in Jackson on the first day of early voting in Tennessee.

WASHINGTON -- Justice Department officials are warning that they'll be dispatching fewer trained election observers as a result of a Supreme Court opinion that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

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In this Jan. 7, 2015 file photo, Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson speaks in Indianapolis. A day after warning of potential widespread voting fraud in the state, Indiana's secretary of state acknowledged Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2016, that many of the thousands of altered registration forms she flagged might just be residents rushing to correct their names or birth dates ahead of the election.

The reduction is likely to diminish the department's ability to detect voter intimidation and other potential problems at the polls. It comes as more than a dozen states have adopted new voting and registration rules, and as Republican candidate Donald Trump continues repeating claims that the Nov. 8 election will be rigged.

Former President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday labeled such allegations "baseless."

In a statement released with The Carter Center, the human-rights organization he founded after leaving the White House, Carter said "allegations of potential rigging of U.S. elections, as well as of widespread voter fraud, are baseless, serving only to undermine confidence in our democratic processes and inflame tensions."

[INTERACTIVE: 2016 election coverage]

The Carter Center has monitored more than 100 elections around the world, but never in the U.S. The Carter Center said it has "great confidence" in the integrity of U.S. elections.

Justice Department officials said they will dispatch hundreds of staff members to the polls and expect to have them in at least as many states as during the 2012 election, when they sent more than 780 observers and department personnel to 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 said voters won't detect any difference in the federal presence this year from the 2012 election.

But, Gupta added, there's no way to "sugarcoat" the effect of the court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder opinion, which invalidated a cornerstone of the 1965 voting law.

In a video released Wednesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that though the court's decision had reined in the Justice Department's power, the government would work to "ensure that every voter can cast his or her ballot free of unlawful intimidation, discrimination, or obstruction."

The exact number of personnel will not be revealed until closer to Election Day.

Most of the staff members will be so-called election monitors, who have less authority than federally trained election observers and rely on the cooperation of local officials to do their jobs. Federal observers enjoy unfettered access inside polling places on Election Day and cannot be removed. Justice Department officials say they've been working with local election officials to secure cooperation for their monitors.

The federal observer program has provided an important safeguard during previous elections, especially in places that tried to suppress the votes of blacks, Hispanics and other minority-group members, said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

In past elections, for example, observers were sent to Greensboro, Ala., after white election officials tried to prevent black voters from entering polling places and to Pike County, Ga., after an after-hours voter-registration session was open to whites only, the Justice Department says.

Observers and monitors have long been relied upon to defuse tensions, deter intimidation and encourage faith in the fairness of the electoral process.

"They have the imprimatur of the federal government behind them that is giving them the rights and responsibilities to be in polling places," said Nicole Austin-Hillery, director and counsel of the Washington, D.C., office of the Brennan Center for Justice.

This year, as in past elections, the hundreds of monitors on the ground will be responsible for making sure voters aren't treated differently because of race or gender, that disabled voters are being accommodated and that voters who need them have bilingual election materials, Lynch said in her video message.

This presidential election will be the first since the Shelby County opinion. That ruling threw out a requirement that jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination, mostly in Southern states, seek approval from the federal government before changing the way they hold elections.

The opinion opened the door to state law changes decried by voting-rights advocates, including new voter-ID requirements. Beyond that, it nullified a formula the department had long relied on to allocate observers to jurisdictions nationwide.

The department now says it will send observers only to the handful of jurisdictions that are subject to a federal court order authorizing their presence. Those include Alameda County in California; St. Landry Parish in Louisiana; Orange County in New York; and some communities in Alaska. In 2012, by contrast, the department said it sent observers to monitor polls in 17 jurisdictions in about a dozen states.

Separately, Indiana's secretary of state, a day after warning of potential voting fraud, acknowledged Wednesday that many of the thousands of altered registration forms she flagged might just be residents rushing to correct their names or birth dates ahead of the election.

Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson said she wanted Indiana State Police to investigate to ensure there was no widespread fraud after her office found a heavier than usual number of changes to voter registration forms this election cycle.

"It's very possible that because of heightened activity this year that many of those changes are changes that the individual made," Lawson said. "That should give Indiana voters the comfort that we are vigilant and we are protecting their rights and the elections here are not rigged."

Indiana is the home state of Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican vice presidential nominee, and has tight races for governor and U.S. Senate on the ballot.

State police reassured residents in a statement Wednesday that the system Indiana uses for voter registration "has not been compromised" but said the records Lawson turned over could serve as evidence of forgery in a separate voter-fraud investigation it is pursuing.

That investigation spans 56 counties and focuses on Patriot Majority USA, a Washington-based voter-mobilization group with ties to the Democratic Party that says it's being targeted for political reasons.

Information for this article was contributed by Christina A. Cassidy, Brian Slodysko, Michael Tarm, Tom Davies and staff members of The Associated Press.

A Section on 10/20/2016

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