On Election Day, Michigan’s top legal officials had to phone the Justice Department about its own election monitors. Reports reached the state that monitors were questioning the people who run the polls, and the state told the department to rein them in.
The attorney general’s office and the Department of State contacted the DOJ on Tuesday after monitors in Dearborn asked poll workers for copies of their training materials, and monitors in Flint asked poll workers how they had been trained, as the Detroit News first reported. There were also reports of monitors speaking with voters outside polling places in Lansing after they had voted.
Flint is a majority-Black city. So is Detroit, the largest of the seven Michigan cities the department said it would send monitors to, along with Dearborn, Hamtramck, East Lansing, Grand Rapids and Warren. About 71 monitors are deployed across them. The department has not said how it chose these places, and Black voters in Detroit and Flint are the ones now being watched by federal officials while they vote.
The state’s rules for monitors are narrow. Like any poll watcher, a DOJ monitor may observe. A monitor does not touch election materials or equipment, does not interfere with how the election is run and does not talk to voters. Asking a poll worker to hand over training documents is not observing.
The DOJ’s Michigan coordinator told state officials that was not how the monitors had been trained, according to the Detroit News report, and said the monitors would be spoken to directly. Kim Bush, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Dana Nessel, played down the episodes: “As with any large group of volunteers, there’s likely going to be some people who make mistakes.” State officials told the paper they had no major concerns.
The fix was quick. The question is why it was needed. Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had already called the department’s stated reasons for sending monitors to Michigan unsubstantiated. The department’s earlier letters pointed to long lines, a shortage of provisional ballots and problems with accessible voting machines in 2024, claims Michigan officials disputed. At the August primary, Detroit’s elections director said of the monitors: “There were no real issues, and we were pleased.”
Poll workers in Detroit and Flint are doing a job that cannot be paused on Election Day. The department is entitled to observe them. It is not entitled to supervise them or collect their paperwork, and the state was right to say so while the polls were still open.
Polls in Michigan close at 8 p.m. local time.
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