Election chiefs in Michigan and New Mexico said on Tuesday that Justice Department monitors went beyond their authority at polling places — asking poll workers for their training materials and questioning them about their training in Michigan, and questioning voters themselves in New Mexico, which state officials said the law does not allow.
In New Mexico, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver's office said verified Justice Department monitors in Bernalillo County — the only county in the state on the department's monitoring list — had been asking "some unusual questions and doing things that are not allowed by law such as questioning voters." The county clerk contacted the Justice Department to alert it and get the issue fixed.
In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's office and Attorney General Dana Nessel's office said monitors in Dearborn asked poll workers for copies of their training materials and monitors in Flint questioned workers about how they had been trained — about 71 federal monitors were assigned to polling places in Detroit, Dearborn, Hamtramck, East Lansing, Grand Rapids, Flint, Warren and Lansing. Michigan officials said the Justice Department's coordinator for the state acknowledged that the reported interactions did not follow the monitors' own training instructions and promised to address the issue. A Justice Department spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, gave a different account, saying that questions about training are standard procedure for the monitors.
The Justice Department answered that its team had held a productive call with the New Mexico Secretary of State, believed the issue was resolved, and said the episode would not affect its monitoring for the rest of the day.
The clash matters to every voter in line on Tuesday: the roughly 1,000 federal monitors were sent into all 50 states for the first time to protect the right to vote, and the rules around them exist so that protection never turns into interference — voters cast their ballots free of questioning, and federal oversight stays inside the law.
— Previously posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2026 —
The Justice Department published its full Election Day monitor list on Tuesday and deployed about 1,000 election monitors and observers in all 50 states, the largest monitoring effort in the department's history and the first time its monitors have gone into every state at once.
The published list names the counties and cities where monitors and observers will be present, running from Maricopa County in Arizona, Los Angeles and San Diego in California, Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids in Michigan, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania to Harris, Dallas and Bexar counties in Texas, Fulton and DeKalb counties in Georgia, and Milwaukee in Wisconsin. The department had held the full list back until Election Day itself, telling reporters the locations would be released on the day.
The effort is coordinated by the department's Civil Rights Division. The monitors and observers are drawn from the division, other Justice Department divisions and components, United States Attorney's Offices across the country and federal observers from the Office of Personnel Management, and division personnel will stay in contact with state and local election officials throughout Election Day. As the department told a federal court last week, in the sworn filing covered in the original story below, the wider monitor pool also draws on staff from the Bureau of Prisons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration, while no FBI or ICE employees serve as monitors.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, said: "Election integrity has been one of the top priorities for this Administration and this Division. I am very proud we are deploying the largest monitoring effort in DOJ history, and pursuing transparency for elections in an assertive and nondiscriminatory manner."
The monitors will check for compliance with the federal voting-rights laws the division enforces, including the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the law covering uniformed and overseas voters. The division's Disability Rights Section will watch that voters with disabilities get a full and equal opportunity to vote, and its Criminal Section enforces the federal laws against voter intimidation and voter suppression.
For ordinary voters, the deployment means a federal observer may be present in their own county today, and anyone who runs into a problem covered by federal voting law can reach the division directly on its election hotline, 1-800-253-3931, or by email at VEM@usdoj.gov, with complaints reviewed by the department after Election Day. The monitors observe and report; they do not run the polling places, which stay in the hands of state and local officials. The department has sent monitors to elections since the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, but on a far smaller scale: in the 2022 midterms it covered 64 jurisdictions in 24 states, against every state in the country this year.
— Previously posted on Thursday, October 29, 2026 —
First posted on Instagram
The United States Department of Justice has told a federal court that employees from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will serve as election monitors during the November 3 midterm elections, while agents and employees from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will not.
The assurance came late on Wednesday, October 28, in a declaration filed in a federal court case brought by the civil rights organisation the NAACP, which had sued to bar prosecutors and other law-enforcement personnel from serving as monitors, arguing that the Trump administration's plans amount to voter intimidation. The declaration was filed by Eric Neff, acting chief of the Voting Section in the department's Civil Rights Division, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
According to the filing, the monitors will not be acting as law-enforcement personnel while they monitor. They will mainly observe polling places and take notes, and they will be prohibited from carrying firearms. The department said the monitors have been trained not to interfere in voting and to follow state and local rules, consistent with past practice.
The filing clarifies the staffing of the largest federal election-observation effort in the department's history. The Justice Department plans to deploy about 1,000 monitors in all 50 states on Election Day, roughly three times the number used in the last midterm election. In 2022, the department sent monitors to 64 jurisdictions across 24 states. A department spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, has said every monitor will merely observe and report any potential violations of federal law to the department, which will be reviewed after Election Day, and that the department will not disclose the full list of monitored locations until Election Day.
The scale of the deployment has already changed how some states are preparing. When Justice Department staff arrived in Minnesota this summer to monitor the state's primary election, Minnesota officials deployed about 40 state employees, working in pairs, to track the federal monitors as they travelled through two counties during the August vote. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon has said his office is likely to continue coordinating with the state attorney general's office to shadow federal monitors during the November 3 midterms, when control of Congress is at stake. California has launched a similar programme.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, has criticised the federal effort, saying the federal government is "the source of interference" and "the ones that are intimidating and creating the suppression." The Trump administration has said stricter measures are needed to ensure public confidence in the vote, and has pressed states for voter-registration data as part of its wider election-oversight push.
Federal election monitoring is a longstanding practice: monitors watch polling places and election officials for compliance with federal voting-rights laws. What is new this year is the size of the operation and the use of staff drawn from federal law-enforcement agencies, which voting-rights groups and some state officials say could intimidate voters, while the department insists the monitors will only watch, take notes and report back.