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The United States Department of Justice will deploy around 1,000 election monitors to polling places across all 50 states for Tuesday's midterm elections, the department confirmed on Wednesday, in what officials describe as the largest federal election-monitoring effort in the department's history.
Every monitor will merely observe and report, department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said: "Every monitor will merely observe and report any potential violations of federal law to the Department, which will be reviewed after Election Day." The department has said it will not release the full list of locations until Election Day itself.
In a sworn declaration filed late on Wednesday, October 28, in federal court in Washington, Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Voting Section in the department's Civil Rights Division, told the court that no employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will serve as monitors.
Instead, the monitors will be drawn from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, along with a single Customs and Border Protection employee detailed to the Justice Department who will serve on behalf of the Civil Rights Division, not the Department of Homeland Security, according to the filing.
The monitors will not carry firearms, will not wear anything identifying them as federal agents and will not act as law enforcement personnel while monitoring, Neff said. They are trained not to interfere with any voter or election official, must introduce themselves to election officials when they arrive and carry federal credentials to show if asked. Their work is limited mainly to observing polling places and taking notes.
The scale is far larger than in recent elections. The department sent 289 monitors for the 2022 midterms and 714 for the 2024 election, according to reports. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, said in September that the 1,000-monitor deployment would be "the biggest DOJ election observer effort in history." The department says election monitoring is routine work it has done for decades under the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The declaration was filed in a lawsuit brought by the NAACP, which sued the department in early October seeking the list of jurisdictions where monitors will be deployed, along with records of their roles and qualifications. The NAACP argued that the expanded federal presence could intimidate voters. Neff argued in the filing that releasing the locations could put monitors at risk, and the department told the court that more than 25,000 potentially responsive records cannot be processed before November 3, asking to report back 14 days after the election.
The monitor plan has drawn other legal challenges. Arlington County, Virginia, Denver and voting-rights groups have sued over the prospect of armed federal agents at polling places, and Colorado election officials have clashed with the department over access to polls in Adams County. In Georgia, the department's monitors are headed to six counties that voted Democratic in each of the last three presidential elections.
Monitors may not demand identification, challenge voters, direct or interfere with poll workers, or engage in any political activity, and under a briefing memo for local election officials they generally may enter a polling place only with state and local consent. The department has not publicly named the locations its monitors will visit, and the lawsuits over records and access remain unresolved, with further legal challenges expected after Election Day as the monitors' reports are reviewed.