Some police officers are trained in electoral law

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Cops practicing law. It’s a derogatory phrase muttered in some legal circles to describe cases where police officers apply erroneous interpretations of the laws they enforce.

It may also reflect a broader cynicism about police involvement in matters best left to lawyers or, in the case of the upcoming Nov. 5 election, voting pundits.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola University, understands these sentiments, so much so that it might seem contradictory for him to defend a recent requirement that all Georgia police officers take a one-hour course on the law electoral.

Levitt served as the first White House senior policy adviser on democracy and voting rights under President Joe Biden, and as a constitutional law scholar, he is well-versed in the history of disenfranchisement of some voters by the police, especially during the Jim Crow era. But he still wants the opportunity to explain why it’s a good idea for members of your local police department to learn as much as possible about topics like voter intimidation and election interference.

The most important part of the training, he said, should be ensuring that an agent’s first instinct is to call a lawyer or election official for technical questions related to voting instead of try to interpret the laws themselves. With this foundation, Levitt adds, the main benefit of election training for police officers is to prevent them from obstructing the vote that should be taking place at U.S. polling places.

“There are times you’ll want them there, and there are times you won’t want them,” Levitt said of the police. “Anyway, it’s better they know what they’re doing.”

Specifically, Levitt believes that agents with knowledge of election laws can prevent them from allowing politicians to use them to control the voting process, while ensuring that they correctly enforce applicable laws in their jurisdiction, such as banning firearms at polling stations.

This summer, a vote by the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council made the state the first in the United States to mandate an election law course as part of basic training for new law enforcement officers. police academies. Although the course won’t become an official part of the program until January, board officials have pushed all current officers to complete the course immediately in order to be ready for next month’s presidential election.

Chris Harvey, the council’s deputy executive director, is also a member of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a bipartisan group of election administration and law enforcement experts. Harvey said he has held nine regional trainings for law enforcement across Georgia since January and has also held sessions in states including South Carolina, Michigan and Hawaii.

Harvey says the crux of the training is not for officers to know the intricacies of local election laws, but rather to know the responsibilities they have to ensure elections run smoothly.

Consider Georgia’s ban on voters wearing clothing bearing a candidate’s name to a polling place. Harvey says it’s up to a poll worker to ask a voter wearing a candidate’s T-shirt to change clothes, turn inside out or cover them up. The only time law enforcement should intervene is if the voter refuses, threatens the worker, or otherwise causes a disruption that prevents others from voting.

“Our first rule is like the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm,” Harvey said. “But if this is an issue where law enforcement clearly needs to intervene even if it doesn’t happen at a polling place, then police officers shouldn’t have to call anyone to knowing that they need to intervene.”

In other places, like Maricopa County, Arizona, and Green Bay, Wisconsin, police chiefs and sheriffs have decided on their own to provide election training to their officers. This involves meeting with local election officials to understand their specific needs on Election Day.

In San Marcos, Texas, police officers are receiving training on how to properly respond to voter intimidation, but only as part of a $175,000 deal last year between the city and four Biden campaign supporters -Harris. Supporters sued police for failing to stop a caravan of Trump supporters from harassing a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway days before the 2020 election.

Although police can hinder voting by not doing enough, critics say doing too much on Election Day can be just as harmful. In Indiana, after Secretary of State Diego Morales sent a letter to election officials encouraging them to have local law enforcement present at polling places in case of problems, a coalition of advocacy organizations Voter rights advocacy pushed back.

A letter from Common Cause Indiana, the ACLU and other groups raised concerns that voters must come face-to-face at the polls with the same officers who police some of their neighborhoods.

“The presence of law enforcement will not create a welcoming environment for voters and could cause intimidation and have a chilling effect on voter participation,” coalition members wrote in the June 11 letter.

Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis said earlier this year that he decided it would be best for his officers to stay away from polling places as much as possible during the election. He said they developed an alternative plan to help election officials maintain a smooth voting process.

These strategies could be as simple as ensuring that police officers are available to quickly address matters that could indirectly impact a person’s right to vote. A car accident or a stolen wallet, for example, poses an obstacle on a normal day, but on Election Day it could deprive a voter of their only chance to vote if police are too slow to respond. Harvey says that for other police departments, having plainclothes officers at polling places can also put them in a position to help if necessary, without their presence intimidating voters.

Levitt and others point out, however, that police training in election law should have started months ago. Any crash course that begins today in a police station, Levitt said, is happening far too late.