Voter Intimidation Complaints Surge

Elections watchdogs received more than 4,000 calls complaining of voter intimidation and suppression in the first hours after polls opened on Tuesday morning, outstripping the number of similar issues recorded in 2012.

By 9:30 a.m., more than 5,500 total calls had poured into the Election Protection National Command Center, a hotline maintained by the Lawyers' Commitee for Civil Rights Under Law. While some callers were seeking information, about 43 percent reported problems with polling sites, such as locations that opened late or had equipment that malfunctioned, and roughly 28 percent reported registration issues, such as discovering that their names had been removed from registration rolls.

More than half the complaints of intimidation are coming from Pennsylvania, Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan good government group, said at a press conference Tuesday in the nation's capital.

"The kind of intimidation we're seeing there are poll workers asking who you will vote for, as well as tense exchanges by people waiting on line – when they start shouting at each other and it can be intimidating for voters," Flynn said.

The Lawyers' Committee received more than 50,000 calls during early voting, and it expects to take more than 175,000 calls by the time polls close, roughly equal to the number of calls it received in 2012. Already, however, amid unprecedented vitriol on the campaign trail, Republican nominee Donald Trump's efforts to recruit poll watchers, and the Supreme Court's invalidation of key parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, a larger share of the calls have been to register complaints, said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

"What we have observed is an uptick in the number of complaints regarding voter intimidation and voter harassment," Clarke said at Tuesday's press conference. "It's taking longer for our legal volunteers to resolve the issues that voters are reporting. We're spending more time on the phone working with local election officials and working with state officials to overcome the issues that voters are presenting to us."

She was speaking in the basement of a major corporate law firm in the nation's capital, where the Lawyers' Committee committee had set up its Election Protection National Command Center. In a large room across the hall, dozens of volunteers sat at long tables in groups of four, taking calls from voters with questions and complaints.

Even before noon, several states and counties already stood out.

Altercations reportedly erupted between voters in at least two polling sites in Broward County, Florida, and a crowd allegedly confronted voters as they arrived at a third county polling site, prompting at least one woman who called the hotline to leave before voting.

"A group of individuals aggressively assembled outside the Hollywood Public Library, approaching individuals. In one instance they touched a woman’s car. She did not feel comfortable to park and vote, so she left," Clarke said, referring to the third incident.

Two precinct clerks were fired after the altercations, news sources reported.

At another Florida polling site in Jacksonville, inside a church in a mostly black neighborhood, a person who claimed to be representing a political party entered and refused to leave. In Miami-Dade County, a deputy polling official allegedly refused to enforce the campaign-free zone that encircles polling sites, declaring "that whatever rules he determines will apply are the rules that will apply today," Clarke said. And in Clay County, cars festooned with Confederate Flags reportedly drove past voting sites.

Elsewhere, electronic voting machines crashed in Durham County, North Carolina, and in Tennessee. Voters in Georgia complained "about 11th-hour polling site changes, no notice issued to voters, and so much confusion about where to go to vote," Clarke said. Polling locations opened late in Brooklyn and in parts of Boston, and some sites in Pennsylvania did not have access to Spanish speakers.

This is the first presidential election cycle since the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to strike down a a central part of the Voting Rights Act, curtailing federal oversight of elections and allowing nine states – mostly in the South – to change state election laws without federal approval.

Since then, five of the nine states have instituted new voter ID laws, and some 800 polling sites in jurisdictions previously covered by the act have been closed or relocated.

This alone has caused confusion among voters about where and what they need to vote and among poll workers about current ID requirements, elections experts and civil rights activists say.

"Many of the states didn't do the work they were supposed to do post-litigation to educate voters … to make sure they were educated about the new requirements or the lack of requirements," Judith Brown Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights legal group, said Tuesday.

Officials stopped short of linking the disturbances at polling places to Trump's calls Trump for supporters to "watch other communities" and "certain sections" of the country on Election Day. The Lawyers' Committee focuses on resolving the complaints, themselves, not which candidates or parties might be responsible, Clarke said.

"There is tremendous disruption at the polls today across the country," Wade Henderson, president and CEO of Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said at Tuesday's press conference. "This election may be the most chaotic for voters of color and voters with disabilities in the last 50 years. … What we're seeing today is really a perfect storm for voter disenfranchisement."

Officials urged voters who see or experience voter intimidation, suppression or other issues while voting, to call the following: