The U.S. Justice Department is once again sending election observers to Cibola and Sandoval counties as part of an extensive, nationwide effort to monitor Tuesday’s vote.

Some 800 observers from the department’s Civil Rights Division will be deployed in 23 states, according to a DOJ news release Thursday. That’s several hundred fewer observers than in 2004, but more than twice the number that were watching in 2000, which of course ended up going to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said in the release that his department “will do all it can to help ensure that elections run as smoothly as possible — and, equally important, that the American people have confidence in our electoral process.”

The department has sent observers to monitor certain New Mexico counties for at least a decade. In 1998, 66 federal observers were used in Bernalillio, Cibola, McKinley, Sandoval and Socorro counties under settlements stemming from Justice Department suits, according to a DOJ news release in June of that year. “The settlements require the counties to provide effective language assistance to Native Americans at the polls,” it said.

Why Cibola and Sandoval counties were selected this year is unclear, although they were also the only two counties monitored in 2006, according to CNN.

A story Thursday in The Washington Post added this:

The department is required to monitor polling places covered by the Voting Rights Act or related court orders. In addition, its Civil Rights Section will send watchers to counties in several battleground states.

Cibola County’s biggest community is Grants, but it also contains most of Laguna and Acoma pueblos and portions of the Navajo Nation. Sandoval is home to New Mexico’s third-largest city, Rio Rancho, as well as the communities of Bernalillo, Cuba and Placitas, and seven pueblos — Sandia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, Cochiti, Jemez and Zia.