The Justice Department will put about 1,000 of its own people at polling places on Tuesday, the largest election-monitoring operation it has ever run. The jurisdictions it has named so far include Detroit, Flint, Fulton and DeKalb counties in Georgia, and Prince George’s County, Maryland, all places where Black voters make up a large share of the electorate.
The NAACP is suing to stop it. For the department, that is more than three times the 289 monitors it sent in the 2022 midterms and well above the 714 it deployed in the 2024 presidential election.
Where they are going
The department has not published a full list and says it will release one on Election Day. Reporting by Democracy Docket and Votebeat, based on notices sent to local officials, shows the pattern so far. Michigan received notices on Oct. 21 for seven cities: Detroit, East Lansing, Flint, Grand Rapids, Hamtramck, Lansing and Warren. In Georgia the counties are Chatham, Bibb, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett. Others include Philadelphia, Cuyahoga County in Ohio, Mecklenburg County in North Carolina and Miami-Dade in Florida. Democracy Docket noted that the locations are “almost all Democratic strongholds.”
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced the plan in August, saying the department would deploy “approximately a thousand election monitors in the November election.” The Civil Rights Division is far smaller than 1,000 people, so the department drew on other staff. Court filings, as Newsweek reported, say they include employees from the Bureau of Prisons, the ATF, the DEA and Customs and Border Protection. A department spokesperson said it “never said that it would send federal law enforcement to the polls.”
The NAACP’s case
The NAACP sued on Oct. 16 in federal court in Washington. Its complaint says the plan violates Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which bars intimidation of voters, and argues that “there is no federal statute that gives Defendants the authority to turn polling places into interrogation rooms.” Kristen Clarke, the group’s general counsel and the former head of the Civil Rights Division, said the department is “abusing its power and authority by deploying ‘monitors’ to discourage people from voting and to disrupt the election process.”
A separate NAACP records suit seeks the list of jurisdictions and the monitors’ training materials. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, of the U.S. District Court for D.C., has denied the group’s request for an emergency order forcing the department to produce records immediately, according to Bloomberg Law and other outlets. No court has blocked the deployment.
The department says its monitors are there to watch. In a letter to Pennsylvania, it wrote: “Our monitors only observe and take notes. They do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process.” Attorney General Todd Blanche has described the monitors as consistent with past practice.
States are drawing lines
Monitors can enter a polling place only with local officials’ permission, and several have said no. Marion and Lake counties in Indiana will keep them at least 50 feet from entrances. Jefferson and Fayette counties in Kentucky, and Washington County, Arkansas, are denying access inside. Colorado and Wyoming have also restricted access. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state said DOJ monitors “are not legally entitled to any greater access to polling places than any member of the public.”
Wyoming’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, complained after the state’s primary that two federal monitors arrived without notice and tried to examine voting machines, conduct he called “aggressive, unexpected, and disruptive.” The department denied any impropriety.
Black voters already face long lines, fewer polling places and ID rules in many of these states, and federal officials standing inside the room add a new pressure. Polls open Tuesday, and the department has said the full list of jurisdictions will come out that day.
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