Justice, OPM dispatch hundreds of poll watchers

The Justice Department and the Office of Personnel Management have dispatched more than 850 people to monitor Tuesday's voting -- a record number for a midterm election.

Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Justice is authorized to ask OPM to send observers to specific locations that have been certified by a federal court or the attorney general after allegations of civil rights violations surfaced. Justice officials announced Monday that they had requested 500 such observers, and that more than 350 of the department's own employees also would serve as monitors. The observers have been sent to 69 locations in 22 states. Before 1976, monitors concentrated their efforts in just five states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Now observers are dispatched to polling places ranging from Kings County, N.Y., to Orange County, Calif. OPM has a pool of 900 intermittent employees who are called into service as monitors on an as-needed basis, according to Nancy Randa, OPM's deputy associate director for human resources products and services, who testified on the agency's role before a House subcommittee in November 2005. The pool includes federal retirees, students, private sector workers and full-time employees of other federal agencies. The observers "serve as neutral monitors, who do not intervene if there are violations," Randa testified. "They only watch, listen and record events that occur at particular polling sites on election days." They participate in one-day classroom training sessions prior to serving, and attend pre-briefing sessions the day before elections. Between 1966 and this year, OPM sent a total of more than 26,000 observers to election sites.