The Justice Department dispatched roughly 1,000 election monitors to all 50 states, more than triple its last midterm deployment, and didn’t publish the list of sites until Election Day morning.
The department’s Civil Rights Division said in a press release Tuesday that it would have “approximately 1,000 election monitors and observers deployed,” the largest monitoring effort in its history. The release also listed the counties and cities where they would go.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the division, said on Bloomberg TV on Aug. 17 that the department planned to send about 1,000 monitors. The department began notifying some counties, but a spokesperson said it would release the full list on Election Day,.
The plan had been public since August, but voters could not see where monitors were headed until Election Day itself, leaving almost no time to challenge a deployment in court.
“Election integrity has been one of the top priorities for this Administration and this Division,” Dhillon said in the release.
The department sent 289 monitors for the 2022 midterms and 714 for the 2024 presidential election, NBC News reported. Dhillon has also said the monitors would help make sure citizens’ votes are not canceled out by someone who “shouldn’t be voting,” according to NBC.
But in court Monday, a department official estimated the number was closer to 900 because the department had trouble identifying and training staff in time, according to ABC News.
That estimate ran about 100 monitors below the figure the department announced the next morning.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had asked a federal judge to keep federal law enforcement personnel out of the program entirely, the Michigan Chronicle reported.
“The law is clear – law enforcement agents can have an intimidating effect on voters, especially Black voters, and they have no role and no right to be inside our polling places,” NAACP General Counsel Kristen Clarke said in a Nov. 2 statement.
Staff from agencies including the Drug Enforcement Administration were set to join the effort. An official assured the judge that those employees would be “clerical” workers not authorized to carry guns.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton denied the NAACP’s request Monday night, finding the group had not shown it was likely to win, Fox News reported. He said the department’s assurances that the monitors would be clerical staff, not sworn officers, and would not carry firearms addressed his concerns.
The program went forward on the department’s word that those workers would not act as police at the polls.
“[T]here’s going to be hell to pay for that,” Walton warned at the hearing earlier Monday, if Justice Department lawyer Kathryn Barragan had misrepresented who the monitors would be.
Walton ordered that monitors carry no firearms, make no arrests and wear no uniforms or federal insignia, Fox reported. He also ordered a status report, a written update, by 7 a.m. Tuesday. That morning, the department told him it had made “reasonable efforts” to keep sworn officers out of the program, NBC reported.
Department lawyers said in a court filing last week that FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would not serve as monitors, Newsweek reported. Arlington County, Virginia, sued the administration in October to block armed federal agents from polling places.
In Pennsylvania, state election official Jonathan Marks told counties in an email that the monitors “may not enter restricted areas, inspect voting equipment, or demand access to any records,” Spotlight PA reported. A state spokesperson told the outlet those areas start 10 feet from polling place entrances, effectively keeping monitors outside.