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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.