Election Day has arrived in Texas, and so have federal election observers in several cities. While allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression are being bandied about, Democrats warn about the behavior of GOP poll watchers throughout the state, linking them to tea party groups.

Harris County tea party group King Street Patriots (KSP) and its KSP/True the Vote initiative have attracted the most media attention, as Texas Watchdog‘s Trent Seibert reports. (Read the Texas independent for ongoing coverage of KSP’s legal battles against the Texas Democratic Party, nonprofit Houston Votes and campaign finance watchdog Texans for Public Justice.)

Heeding multiple requests, including from KSP and Democrats, the U.S. Department of Justice has deployed DOJ attorneys to monitor Harris County polling places on Election Day. The Texas Observer has devoted multiple stories to KSP: “Voting is sacred but politics can be profane,” writes Forrest Wilder; “The King Street Patriots seem ignorant of the racial history they’re stirring up,” writes Michael Berryhill; “Now everyone is left to cross their fingers that the day can pass without incident,” writes Abby Rapoport.

The DOJ is also sending federal observers from the Office of Personnel Management to watch elections in Dallas, Fort Bend, Galveston and Williamson counties.

DOJ spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa couldn’t give specifics on why observers were being sent to those particular counties, but did say that the DOJ can send ‘observers’ to jurisdictions when the agency has been authorized to do so by a court or U.S. attorney general within the past three years. When that’s not the case, the DOJ sends ‘monitors,’ as in Harris County.

The last time the DOJ sent federal monitors to Harris County was in November 2004. The agency sent monitors to Harris County three times in 2004 and twice in 2003, she said.

The DOJ sent observers to Fort Bend and Galveston counties in March, citing authorization from the attorney general as well as a 2009 court order in Fort Bend and a 2007 court order in Galveston. Both court orders concerned compliance with minority language requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

Dallas County Democratic Party executive director Steve Tillery warned his local party’s judges and alternate judges that tea party-trained poll watchers “are planning to ‘take pictures of illegal voters’ and to ‘stop illegal voting’ according to their definition of what is legal or illegal,” according to the Dallas Morning News’ Gromer Jeffers Jr. in Trail Blazers.

Meanwhile, Texas GOP Vote blog relayed reports of voting machine malfunctions in Dallas, where Democratic U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson’s GOP opponent Stephen Broden’s name was left off the ballot.

Additionally, Texas Democrats said tea partiers have trained poll watchers in Harris, Dallas, Travis, Tarrant, Fort Bend, Williamson, McLennan, Montgomery, El Paso and Bexar counties.

Recently, Travis County Democrats called for DOJ observers in Austin, alleging that Travis County GOP officials instructed Republican poll watchers to focus on heavily minority precincts in East Austin, and also citing reported irregularities in Williamson County. Travis GOP chair Rosemary Edwards did not deny telling poll watchers to focus on those areas, saying that was because “we’ve had specific complaints in those polling places,” according to the Austin Chronicle.

According to a news release from Public Citizen’s Texas Vox, “there were complaints of poll watchers interfering with or intimidating voters and other potential election violations” during early voting in Bexar County as well.

In McLennan County, the Texas GOP’s Janet Jackson stirred up criticism from both the county Democrats and county Republicans for her handling of a poll watcher training class, according to the Waco Tribune-Herald (subscription-only).

When asked by a local KXXV-TV news reporter to respond to Democrats’ fears that GOP poll watching is actually “a voter intimidation thing,” Jackson laughed and said, “Sorry boys!”