Intellectual Property Law

I wrote earlier this week about the Election Protection Network's search for legal experts to man its hotline and visit polling places on election day to ensure that election laws are followed and eligible voters aren't turned away from the polls.

Jonah Goldman of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, which is one of 150 groups in the Election Protection coalition, said the group has already heard from about 5,000 legal experts who are interested in volunteering their services on election day. By comparison, Goldman says the group had only 500 to 600 legal volunteers signed up by this time in 2004, when the country last voted for a president. Goldman expects the number of volunteers this year will increase to 10,000 before November 4th.

Additionally, the group's voter hotline number (1-866-OUR-VOTE) is already receiving 1,000 calls a day from voters around the country asking about voter registration issues, eligibility rules for voting and other information.

Goldman says 750 phones will be set up to answer calls to the hotline on election day, and the system will have the capacity to receive 1,500 calls simultaneously (this includes calls that can be held in the system's queue at any one time). About 3,500 people will be working the hotline on election day, with the remaining volunteers handling problems in the field at polling locations.

Voters are invited to call about any problem they encounter during early voting or on election day, including long lines, voter intimidation, and voting machine breakdowns and glitches.

Goldman says the group will be focusing on some of the usual suspects -- Ohio and Florida -- where problems have occurred in past elections. But legal experts are also looking at potential new hot spots in states that have been designated battleground regions for the first time. States like Virginia and New Mexico, Goldman said, are likely to get unprecedented turnouts that will tax poll workers and the resources of election officials.

One big problem he's seeing around the country is with voter registration. The number of new voters who have registered is breaking records around the country, but many states haven't increased their election budgets since 2004 and are trying to process double and triple the number of new voters with the same resources they had four years ago. As a result, voters who believe they registered may show up at the polls and find they're not on the roll because their registration application wasn't processed in time.

New voters are urged to submit their applications well in advance of their state's voter registration deadline, which is 30 days before the election in most states. You can find the registration deadline for your state here.