Follow-Up: Federal Judge Rejects NAACP Bid to Limit DOJ Election Monitors Ahead of November 3 Midterms

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton in Washington ruled late on November 2 to deny an emergency bid by the NAACP and other civil rights groups to block the U.S. Department of Justice from deploying election monitors to polling places on midterm Election Day, November 3, leaving the department's deployment of roughly 1,000 monitors nationwide in place.

According to Bloomberg Law, Judge Walton said the plaintiffs had failed to present sufficient evidence that including employees of federal law enforcement agencies among the nearly 1,000 monitors would amount to voter intimidation in violation of federal law. The Justice Department has confirmed that monitors will be sent to all 50 states in one of the largest election-monitoring efforts in its history; the monitors only observe and document possible violations of federal voting laws such as the Voting Rights Act, do not interfere with voting, and do not carry firearms.

At a hearing earlier on Monday, Justice Department attorney Kathryn Barragan told the court that the monitors drawn from the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are administrative and clerical staff, that the Civil Rights Division had worked to exclude sworn law-enforcement officers, and that the department would have "no problem" with a court order requiring reasonable efforts to exclude sworn officers from serving as monitors. Barragan put the total number of monitors at around 900.

Judge Walton noted at the hearing that this account appeared inconsistent with an October 28 written declaration by Eric Neff, head of the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section, and warned the department of serious consequences if its representations to the court about who the monitors are proved untrue. The NAACP argued that deploying any federal law-enforcement personnel to polling places constitutes voter intimidation prohibited by the Voting Rights Act.

The case, NAACP v. Blanche, was filed on October 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. GSM previously reported the NAACP's lawsuit seeking to stop the deployment of about 1,000 federal monitors and states' preparations for the expanded observer presence; the specific monitoring locations are expected to be released by the Justice Department on Election Day.

（Source: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia）

Source: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)

Photo: 图：位于华盛顿的美国司法部总部罗伯特·肯尼迪大楼。APK 摄，CC BY 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington. By APK, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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