Inside the Plan to Send 1,000 DOJ Monitors to the Polls
· The Atlantic
For more than 60 years, the Department of Justice has sent its attorneys and staff to polling places across the country to ensure that Americans can vote free of discrimination or intimidation. They’ve watched to see if Black voters were illegally hindered in any way, if those who use a wheelchair or walker could get into facilities, and if those who couldn’t read the ballot for any reason—blindness, lack of English proficiency, or simply not having the skill—had help. Officials selected locations that had had problems in the past or where people had reported concerns.
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When the feds would show up in the Tucson area of Arizona, where Spanish speakers and retirees are as numerous as the cacti dotting the Sonoran Desert, local officials considered the monitors partners in protecting the right to vote. But ahead of the primary election this past July, when Pima County Elections Director Constance Hargrove learned that DOJ was sending six representatives—most of whom were criminal prosecutors—she became worried. Would they just witness the vote, as in years past, or were they planning to gather evidence to later try to undermine the results? Would they know the basic rules? She told DOJ’s coordinator during a phone call: “Remind them that they cannot take a gun or weapon into the vote centers.”
On Primary Day, the monitors’ activities seemed normal, Hargrove told us. But she’s still concerned about the plan to send 1,000 of them to polling locations in every state for Tuesday’s election. The number itself is “a tall order,” Hargrove told us, as most previous administrations—Republican and Democratic—have detailed far fewer. And then there’s this department’s track record on elections. DOJ under President Trump has taken up his years-long quest to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Officials have seized ballots in Georgia, gathered material from Arizona, and questioned election officials in Wisconsin—but still have not found evidence of the widespread voter fraud the president has alleged. In recent days, DOJ reminded all state election officials to preserve materials from their elections.
“I’m not going to freak myself out before Election Day, or my poll workers, or the voters,” Hargrove said. She has reminded workers to follow their training should the monitors—or anyone else—be disruptive: “You can always call 911.”
Her concerns and suspicions are widely shared among the dozen-plus local and state election officials we spoke with across the country. Some worry that a long-standing program created during the civil-rights era to prevent intimidation, particularly of nonwhite voters, could be used as an extension of the administration’s attacks on the democratic process. The officials also said they fear that monitors could misinterpret what they see and then share incomplete or inaccurate information with DOJ that could be used to undermine the results.
Kiersten V. Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, strenuously objected to these concerns in a written response to our questions about the program. Pels noted that the election officials we spoke with did not cite an example of “a single voter who was intimidated by a Justice Department monitor.” Should local officials see monitors acting improperly, Pels said, they should report them to DOJ.
“The Department has monitored elections for decades, under administrations of both parties. Monitors observe. They do not interfere with voting, and they follow state rules on polling place access,” Pels wrote. “Every monitor has the same role: to observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department. The Department will review those concerns after Election Day and act where appropriate.”
This year’s program is overseen by Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who has described monitors as a way “to increase voter confidence, to troubleshoot problems.” Dhillon’s critics have noted her ties to prominent election deniers and her support of legislation limiting mail-in voting. Her division, meanwhile, has sued dozens of state election officials, seeking—so far unsuccessfully—access to voter rolls containing partial Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. The suits are part of a nationwide search for noncitizens who might be illegally voting. “We see a problem, frankly, with some election officials refusing to clean up their voter rolls and knowingly allowing noncitizens, for example, to stay on the voter rolls,” she told Bloomberg. “This is a federal crime.” In a July post on X, Dhillon described the monitor program as aimed at ensuring equal access to the ballot, as it has in the past. But, she said, it will also help make sure that no American’s vote is “cancelled out by someone who shouldn’t be voting.” (Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, analysis after analysis has found.) Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told us that its monitors “will not be questioning voters about their citizenship status at the polls.” But Pels added that “if our monitors uncover evidence of such crimes while monitoring, we will use it.”
[Read: The election deniers’ long game]
The Justice Department has recruited criminal prosecutors to participate as monitors. Their inclusion overturns a longtime practice of not using those who have the power to charge people with crimes, and has raised questions about how the Justice Department might use their observations, particularly in places central to criminal investigations into the 2020 election, such as Arizona and Georgia. A former DOJ Civil Rights Division official, who requested anonymity to speak with us out of fear of professional retaliation, told us that previous administrations “never sent prosecutors, because we never wanted to do anything that might scare people.” Pels told us that monitors will not identify themselves as prosecutors.
Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section, said in a sworn declaration released as part of ongoing litigation that no FBI or ICE employees would serve as monitors. However, employees from the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Administration would be involved—a departure from long-held norms, three former DOJ attorneys told us. Pels said that their inclusion is “not new policy” and that they are “not being sent as law enforcement.”
To try to understand how the monitors might act on Tuesday, we looked at how they operated during the primaries. Although they watched without incident in many states, that wasn’t the case in deep-red Wyoming. On Primary Day in August, two monitors showed up at a Cheyenne polling place and asked the poll workers “highly unusual” questions that were outside their purview, including about how electronic poll books were acquired and whether they could see the tabulators, according to one local official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. Pels said the monitors’ questions were “routine” and disputed that they’d asked about the procurement of equipment. The local official told us that workers described the monitors as “very assertive,” and that they walked around “like they owned the place.” She added: “If you’re not expecting big, tall, beefy men, it could be rattling.”
Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, a Republican, criticized the monitors’ activities at a public meeting, explaining that just as he doesn’t like the idea of the federal government “taking our guns,” he also dislikes the notion of it “taking our votes.” Pels told us that the Justice Department disagreed “with the public framing” that the monitors were “‘aggressive’ or did anything improper,” and said that Dhillon “had a cordial meeting” after the primary with the governor, the state attorney general, and a county election clerk.
[Read: The supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms]
We submitted roughly 200 public-records requests to states, counties, cities, and towns over the past several weeks, seeking to learn more about DOJ’s plan and the people carrying it out. Those records, along with our conversations with election officials, reflected that nearly all of the monitors’ visits during the primaries were professional. Some monitors asked poll workers about their training; some talked with voters outside polling locations. DOJ coordinated with local officials, advising when the monitors would arrive and what they could expect from them. A DOJ lawyer recently wrote to the lieutenant governor of Utah with an assurance that the program would run “the same way as in the past,” according to correspondence that we obtained. “Monitors follow all rules of the state and jurisdiction. Monitors dress in business casual clothing. No uniforms or pins identifying as DOJ are allowed.”
But a meeting a few days ago between DOJ and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, reflected fears that this year’s election won’t be business as usual. During the conversation, which state officials told DOJ they were recording, Fontes asked why he should believe that the monitors are working in a nonpartisan manner, given the department’s recent lawsuit seeking to decertify Alaska’s Senate results if the Democratic candidate wins, according to audio of the meeting we reviewed. “It’s pretty patently obvious that a lawsuit filed based on a political outcome puts the department in a compromised position,” Fontes told the DOJ attorneys, who said they are sending roughly 20 monitors to the Phoenix area, plus more around the state. The DOJ officials replied that the monitors are, and would, remain nonpartisan. Fontes also asked if the monitors could be called to testify about their observations in court—as witnesses. Neff, the acting chief of DOJ’s Voting Section, responded that such a “speculative” scenario would be “assessed on a case-by-case basis.” Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told us that this stance is “nothing new” and not newsworthy. “That’s how the law works,” she said.
States can decline to let the monitors into polling sites and instead require them to stand outside at a distance. Some red states have a history of doing so, such as Missouri and Florida, which banned monitors during the 2022 midterms. Hennepin County, in Minnesota, asked monitors to stay 100 feet away from one voting location during the August primary election and will do so again on Tuesday. One video in August captured a local election judge debating with two men dressed in polo shirts about how close they could get. “I’m assuming you don’t want to interfere with our ability to check for your compliance with federal law,” one of the monitors told the judge.
Most of the monitors’ names and assigned locations are not publicly known, but through our public-records requests, and from research conducted by Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit, we identified some of the more than 80 monitors who were sent to polling locations during the primaries. Among the DOJ employees sent to monitor the primary were: Chris Gardner, who represented the Fulton County Republican Party in 2024 as it supported an election-board member who sued after refusing to certify the results of that year’s primary; Joseph Voiland, who represented the Trump campaign when it tried to overturn the 2020 election results in Wisconsin; and Alexander Keely, now a senior adviser to Dhillon, whose Republican National Lawyers Association member profile says he served as a “Trump 47 Election Integrity Captain” for a Pennsylvania county in 2024. DOJ did not respond to questions about whether these employees would serve as monitors on Tuesday, and Pels stressed in a statement that all monitors go through the same training.
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, local officials were alarmed when we described to them in July the biographies of some of the monitors assigned to their county for the primary, including a DOJ violent-crime-section chief, a federal prosecutor who specializes in public-corruption criminal probes, and a man who pleaded guilty in 2016 to crimes involving unauthorized computer intrusions after hacking two election websites in Florida. David Levin spent 20 days in prison for those crimes. Levin did not respond to our requests for comment, but he has previously claimed that he had been attempting to show the Florida county its own security vulnerabilities and called his actions “one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life.”
[Read: The election system wasn’t built for this]
Records show that Maricopa County officials told DOJ last week they would not allow Levin to monitor their elections. The county attorney’s office, led by a Republican, also asked DOJ to commit in writing that it “will not send any election monitors to Maricopa County whom the DOJ knows has a felony conviction of any kind, or a conviction for any election-related criminal offense, in any state in the Union.”
Pels told us on Saturday that Levin is “no longer with the department” and “will not be a monitor on Election Day.” She said that DOJ hired and trained “qualified individuals to serve our country in a non-partisan manner” and that staff are expected to carry out their duties ethically and legally, “no exceptions.”
Internal DOJ materials we reviewed show that monitors have been trained to focus on voter-access laws—and not to interfere with the election. At least two longtime attorneys in the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section are helping coordinate the monitors, emails show. Former DOJ officials told us their involvement, and that of other career attorneys who have prior experience with the program, makes them confident in it.
Although 1,000 monitors is an unusually high number, the country has close to 100,000 polling locations, and millions of people vote by mail in the weeks before Election Day. The deployment is unlikely “to actually change voters’ experiences in very many places,” Anna Baldwin, a former monitor who is now the voting-rights-litigation director at the Campaign Legal Center, told us.
Still, the election officials we spoke with said they have been fielding questions from staff, poll workers, fellow officials, and voters who are worried about the federal presence. One Boston official told us that time normally devoted to the nuts and bolts of preparing to run an election has been spent fielding questions from poll volunteers such as, What would you do if the federal government intervenes in your election in some way? Boston’s election administrators have developed new procedures, such as assigning workers to take an inventory of ballots, should federal agents seize them. In Wisconsin, election clerks have been “getting hundreds of emails” from voters and advocacy groups, asking what the plan is if federal law enforcement shows up, a state election official said at a public meeting.
[Read: The real threat of election interference]
Isaac Cramer, the executive director of the Charleston County Board of Elections, in South Carolina, said he’s worried that the monitors may intensify anxieties at the polls. “When you hear DOJ is coming,” he told us, “I think that can bring some fear. It can bring questions.” When monitors went to his county for a primary runoff this summer, false conspiracy theories immediately sprang up online.
Many city and county clerks told us that in all likelihood, the monitoring won’t interfere with their ability to fairly and accurately run the election. But the precautions they’ve had to take, and the questions they’ve had to answer, show how a program meant to protect the right to vote is being seen as a way to undermine it.