The Justice Department is preparing to send about 1,000 election monitors to polling places in all 50 states on November 3, and it has begun notifying the counties it plans to watch. Officials in both parties are reacting, some with alarm and some with a shrug, PBS News reported on Friday, October 23.
Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department's Civil Rights Division, first announced the plan on August 17, according to CBS News, which called it a record deployment. By comparison, CBS reported, the department sent 714 people to 86 jurisdictions in 27 states for the 2024 presidential election. A department official told PBS that 388 monitors were sent during the 2022 midterms.
What monitors can and cannot do
The department says monitors are there to "observe and report" and must not interfere with voting, PBS reported. Any enforcement would come after the election. If monitors see a problem on Election Day, such as voter intimidation, the department says it would escalate the issue and work with local law enforcement. Monitors will not be sent to early voting sites.
There is one notable change this year. The department has dropped its long standing rule against prosecutors serving as monitors, a senior official confirmed to PBS, though the official said prosecutors would not personally prosecute any violations they observed. The official said all monitors received a training video, are nonpartisan and are on a "tight leash."
David Becker, a former attorney in the department's voting section, told PBS the scale is "not normal, but I'm not particularly concerned." He added that the agency does not have "blanket authority to be everywhere" and that monitors must follow state and local rules on who may enter a polling place. The department says it is focusing on "high-population areas because that's where the most voters are" and on places with past problems with language or disability access.
How the states are responding
The reaction does not split neatly along party lines. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said her office received a letter naming Adams County, northeast of Denver, as a monitoring site, according to PBS. The letter says, "Our monitors only observe and take notes." She called the department "hostile" to free and fair elections and said she sees no "reasonable basis" for the monitors.
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, was less concerned. He told PBS that monitors in his state may enter a polling place like any voter but cannot go past the voter ID checkpoint, and said of the increase, "That's nothing." He said even one monitor in Kansas would be "overkill" and suggested the effort may be a "feel-good measure" for the department.
The Wyoming episode
Critics point to the August 18 primary in Wyoming. Two monitors asked a local official about poll worker training and new equipment and sought to look at vote tabulators, and the official said she had no advance warning, PBS reported. A department official acknowledged, "we didn't, unfortunately, inform the local clerk ahead of time." The Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights legal group, said the Wyoming monitors "improperly sought access to voting machines" and urged Congress to limit observers to monitoring and documenting compliance with federal law.
Asked about reports that some monitors had worked for partisan election challengers, the senior official told PBS the department had seen no "specific facts" of misconduct during the primaries. The official also said monitors are not checking voters' citizenship before they enter polling places.
The bigger picture
The deployment comes as the administration presses states on noncitizen voting. The Civil Rights Division has filed 31 lawsuits seeking unredacted state voter rolls, CBS reported, and judges have blocked the requests in 23 of them. This week a federal judge curbed DHS field operations looking for noncitizen voters in nine states, and the department is in a federal appeals court trying to make California set aside mail ballots from people it calls likely noncitizens.
Monitoring is not new. CBS reported that the Civil Rights Division sends monitors "to ensure compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act," which bars discrimination in voting. What is new is the scale, the use of prosecutors and the political climate around it.
Where the line falls between watching an election and pressuring one is the kind of question the Two Taps legal panel of Daniel Rosenberg, Michael Dye and Lloyd Golburgh takes apart on the show.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
