The Trump administration has been sued over its plans to deploy “a historic number” of election monitors to polling stations during next month’s midterm elections. The bid “stands to jeopardize” the elections and could “interfere with the right of voters to participate in the election free from intimidation”, according to the NAACP, which filed a lawsuit against Harmeet Dhillon, head of the justice department’s civil rights division, who has said she hopes to send 1,000 monitors to midterm polling sites in November. The NAACP lawsuit seeks to force the Trump administration to release records regarding the deployment of the monitors.
The NAACP said it requested such records under the Freedom of Information Act on 1 September, but said the Department of Justice had failed to comply. On Sunday Todd Blanche, the attorney general, confirmed that election monitors will be sent to all 50 states. Speaking to Fox News, however, he downplayed the role of the monitors.
Every single election’s been monitored,” Blanche said. In August Mark Gordon, the Republican governor of Wyoming, criticized the behavior of two election monitors who he said arrived at a polling station during the state’s primaries earlier this year without notice, and attempted to examine voting machines. We disagree with the public framing that the two monitors we sent were ‘aggressive’ or did anything improper.
The discussion with the Governor and his team was helpful and we look forward to having a presence in Wyoming in the general election.” “During the primary season, we saw monitors deployed with no notice to the public or jurisdiction, and no clear evidence that they were there for a legitimate civil rights purpose,” Clarke said. Americans deserve transparency on the justice department’s increasingly evolving and unwieldy plans. With election day just weeks away, the NAACP is seeking judicial intervention to ensure transparency and to safeguard the fundamental right to vote.”
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