Justice Department Notifies Counties in at Least Five States It Plans to Monitor on Election Day

Since Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon said in September that DOJ would send 1,000 observers nationwide, the department has been quiet on specifics. That changed Tuesday, Oct. 20, when it began notifying counties that it wants to monitor them on Election Day, Nov. 3.

Counties in Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Texas and Washington have been notified so far, according to NPR's reporting. The list was still growing as of Wednesday.

What DOJ has and hasn't said

Dhillon called the plan "the largest monitoring effort" in the department's history. DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels told NPR that the jurisdictions and the total number will be shared "closer to the election."

For scale, the Biden-era Justice Department monitored 64 jurisdictions in 24 states on Election Day in 2022, the last midterm year. A 1,000-person deployment would be a big jump in headcount, though the department has not said how many jurisdictions that covers.

Monitoring itself is not new. Blanche has said DOJ has monitored elections since the 1960s.

States left scrambling

One process change has drawn complaints. In earlier cycles, state officials were told at the same time as the counties. This time they were not, according to officials in three states who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Those officials said states scrambled after notifications began Tuesday to learn where DOJ planned to be. Multiple state officials told NPR they received notifications after NPR asked the department why states had been left out.

At least one county official is also publicly asking why his locality was put on the list. DOJ has not explained how it chose counties.

The Wyoming primary

Most states reported no incidents with DOJ monitors in this year's primaries. Wyoming was the exception.

The state's Republican governor voiced concern about "aggressive" and "irregular" behavior by monitors during the August primary. The Republican clerk of Laramie County told NBC News the monitors' conduct "showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections."

DOJ rejects that account. "We disagree with the public framing that the two monitors we sent were 'aggressive' or did anything improper," Pels said. She added that Dhillon met with Wyoming officials afterward.

Two monitors in one state is a small sample. It is also the one case this year in which a state's officials publicly objected to the monitors' conduct, and the objections came from Republicans, not just Democrats.

Blanche: no armed agents, and a push for voter ID

Blanche has dismissed the fears head-on. Asked on Fox News Sunday by host Shannon Bream whether the accusation that armed federal agents would be at the polls was accurate, he answered: "Completely false. They're going to be election monitors as they are every single time."

He said the volunteers are going to "every state," not just Democratic or Republican ones. In an Epoch Times interview that aired Oct. 6, he said the idea of agents intimidating voters or seizing uncounted ballots "comes from a certain pocket of mostly people on the left trying to scare Americans."

Blanche says the real vulnerability is noncitizen voting. He said DOJ has indicted nearly 100 people across 15 states in that effort and argued that critics who once said no one was voting illegally now have to accept there is a problem. A voter ID law, he said, would be "a pretty basic" fix and would give DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security "a lot less to investigate."

The indictment count is Blanche's own figure. He did not offer a breakdown in the interview. Voter ID is a mainstream election-integrity position, and requiring proof of eligibility is a defensible policy goal on its own terms.

The worry on the other side

Critics are not mainly worried about the monitors' existence. They are worried about what comes after polls close. NPR reports that unnamed experts fear federal law enforcement could use Trump's claims about the 2020 election, which he continues to say he won, or new claims this year as a pretext to seize ballots during counting or otherwise interfere.

No source has said DOJ plans to do that, and Blanche has called the idea false. The concern rests on the administration's broader push to take more control of election administration from states and localities, and on the department's decision to hold back the list of locations.

The fight over federal power in this election is also a political backdrop. NPR noted that Trump told supporters in Northern Kentucky that this is "a much more powerful term" and that he can "do stuff that's unbelievable." Presidential historian Tevi Troy described Trump as a "unilateralist." Those are comments about executive power in general, not about the monitors.

What comes next

The next concrete step is DOJ's promised disclosure of which jurisdictions it will monitor and how many. Pels said that will come "closer to the election," with Election Day Nov. 3 now less than two weeks away.

Blanche has also said the department expects litigation after the vote, as it does after every election.