VOTING OBSERVERS

Harvard Law group to send students to ensure poll access (From the Boston Herald, via Law.com):

BOSTON - Chaotic vote counting is the lasting image of the 2000 election, but a group of Harvard Law School students say the millions of voters who were wrongly denied ballots was a bigger story. This year, they're trying to prevent it from happening again.

The new group, called Just Democracy, announced its plans Tuesday to dispatch at least 1,000 students from law schools across the country to cut through confusion at the polls.

As many as 4 million eligible voters were denied ballots in 2000 because of errors in voter registration databases or polling place problems, according to a study by the Caltech-MIT voting technology project.

Just Democracy's leaders say a bogged-down bureaucracy or ignorance of the law, not malice, explains the majority of the problems, and those problems can be fixed, said Harvard law student Becca O'Brien, the groups's founder.

Good for O'Brien, and good luck (and where can I sign up to help?). My sense is that these kinds of efforts are important for two reasons, aside from the fact that they are an essential part of voting rights implementation: first, they could have a real impact on election outcomes, and second, they highlight the anti-democratic arguments of conservatives who are willing to countenance the return of poll taxes and literacy tests as a way of excluding people from the polls, for example (see here and here).

Rights don't implement themselves, especially in an environment in which there is hostility toward their exercise.