Washington, D.C. election officials asked the National Guard to keep troops away from ballot drop boxes after residents complained about soldiers posted beside one just before voting began.
The D.C. Board of Elections said Friday that it had received complaints about Guard members posted near a drop box next to the Foggy Bottom-GWU Metro station. The city’s 55 drop boxes opened Friday morning and will accept ballots through Election Day on Nov. 3, the Washington Sun reported.
“We are addressing the concerns with the National Guard directly and have requested that they impose limitations on the placement of National Guard service members near drop boxes and other voting locations in the District,” board spokesperson Sarah Graham said, according to the Washington Sun.
The complaints followed a video filmed Thursday by Bryan K. Randolph, a D.C.-based political and legal commentator, showing what he said were three Guard members standing in front of the drop box.
“[I]t was a giant white box with the word ‘ballot,’ pretty hard to miss, and they clearly at best have not been told to stay away from or trained to recognize and stay away from [it]," Randolph said.
Federal law bars anyone in federal civil or military service from keeping “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held” unless the force is needed “to repel armed enemies of the United States,” according to the statute.
More than 63,000 D.C. voters returned their ballots through drop boxes in the June primary, roughly 40% of all votes cast, according to the Washington Sun.
“Armed troops do not belong near ballot boxes,” Monica Hopkins, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, told Common Dreams. She also called the Guard’s deployment in D.C. “an affront to democracy.”
“Especially jarring in the nations capital, like an occupying force,” former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman wrote on Bluesky Thursday about the Guard’s continued presence on the city’s streets.
The Guard has patrolled D.C. since President Donald Trump deployed troops there last summer, Common Dreams reported. Trump has credited the troops with helping drive down crime, while critics say the deployment sets a “troubling precedent” for using the military in law enforcement, the Washington Sun reported.
In June, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), the District’s nonvoting delegate in the House, demanded answers about a different video showing Guard members gathered around a drop box, according to a statement from her office. Unlike state Guard units, which answer to governors, the D.C. Guard is controlled by the president, the statement said.
“The fact that Guard personnel reportedly had not been instructed to avoid ballot drop boxes suggests a troubling lack of awareness by leadership of the impact these deployments are having on the District and its residents,” Norton said at the time.
“I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see,” Trump told Time in an interview published Oct. 1 when asked whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency before the midterms absent widespread violence in the streets.
Trump also told The New York Times in January that he “should have” ordered the National Guard to seize ballot boxes during the 2020 election, according to Democracy Docket.