Richland Dems cry foul after DOJ announces plan to send monitors to observe election
The U.S. Department of Justice plans to send voting rights monitors to Richland County and 43 other jurisdictions in 18 states on Election Day to ensure federal voting rights laws are being upheld, the agency announced Monday.
“Our federal laws protect the right of all American citizens to vote without suffering discrimination, intimidation, and harassment,” Eric S. Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights division, said in a statement. “The work of the Civil Rights Division around each federal general election is a continuation of its historical mission to ensure that all of our citizens can freely exercise this most fundamental American right.”
In its statement, the Justice Department said it was typical for the agency to deploy federal poll monitors to sites across the country on Election Day, but two Democratic state senators from Richland County said the move was unprecedented.
Sens. Dick Harpootlian and Darrell Jackson, both Richland Democrats, released a joint statement in response to the DOJ’s plans calling them a “blatant and despicable effort by Donald Trump and Bill Barr to use federal power to intimidate Black and minority voters.”
Harpootlian said he wasn’t aware of federal monitors being sent to Richland election sites in decades, had not received advance notice of the DOJ’s plans and had gotten no explanation for what prompted them.
“They’re here to allegedly protect minority voters, but no minority voters have made any complaints,” he said.
While Harpootlian has been highly critical of Richland County’s well-documented history of operational problems on Election Day, he said he’s never expressed concerns about the sort of issues the federal election monitors are supposed to keep an eye on.
“No one has complained about Richland County’s election process more than me,” he said. “But what I’ve complained about is incompetence, not any effort to intimidate voters.”
The senator said the last-minute deployment targeting a large, heavily Democratic bastion of voters like those in his county seemed like a clear attempt to intimidate and suppress turnout.
“This is just a thinly veiled effort to suppress the African American vote and it’s shameful,” he said. “We’ve gone from attorney generals who have fought discrimination to an attorney general who supports it. This is terrible.”
The DOJ did not respond to emailed questions about its reasons for sending election monitors to Richland County or to Harpootlian’s accusations that the move was politically motivated.
Instead, it released a statement reiterating its continued mission to monitor the field on Election Day, “just as it has in years past.”
“Every federal election year, the Department makes a new assessment of where the Department should be, and sends out staff based on that assessment for that year,” a DOJ spokesperson said.
State Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said the Justice Department had informed the agency and the Richland County elections director on Friday of its plan to send election monitors to the county.
He said the DOJ routinely sends monitors to counties across the state, including Richland, but did not explain why they were doing so in this instance.
Whitmire said federal election monitors are permitted inside polling places, but will remain outside on Tuesday as a pandemic-related precaution. They’ll be able to speak with voters as they exit polling places, he said.
In addition to sending poll monitors to jurisdictions nationwide, the DOJ also said it would have a national call center where voters could lodge complaints about possible federal voting rights violations.
Harpootlian said his staff attorneys were looking into filing a petition in federal court to block the Justice Department’s planned deployment of election monitors.
This story was originally published November 2, 2020 at 4:45 PM.