Election Protection call centers
New York Times reports: The election swept through several of the city's law firms yesterday, with lawyers wearing headsets to answer phone calls from voters across the country who had questions that ranged from the banal, like registration problems, to the bizarre, like a Satanist who refused to vote in a church.
More than 800 lawyers, law students and legal aides in New York City took part in the volunteer hot line, part of the Election Protection project, which was organized in part by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, a nonpartisan Washington group. The aim, said a New York organizer, was to inform voters, particularly those in minority communities, and to deal with potential voter intimidation, poll worker incompetence and other problems.
"We're there to protect minority voters wherever they may be," said the organizer, Debo Adegbile, associate director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which helped coordinate the call-in centers in New York City.
The project is a response to the flaws that occurred during the 2000 election when, the Lawyers' Committee said, votes in low-income, high-minority districts were more likely to be uncounted than those in affluent districts with fewer minorities. -- The New York Times > New York Region > From Manhattan, Lawyers Monitor the Nation's Polls **