The Justice Department stationed about 1,000 monitors at polling places in all 50 states on Election Day, the largest deployment in its history. Many went to Democratic-leaning counties and to majority-minority ones, where Black voters are the electorate the monitors are standing outside of.
For comparison, under President Joe Biden the department watched the 2022 midterms in 64 jurisdictions across 24 states. This year, according to Democracy Docket’s count, monitors were assigned to 126 counties. The department did not release the full list until Election Day.
The pattern is in the list. Democracy Docket found monitors in Democratic counties in red states, including Broward County in Florida, Wake County in North Carolina, Dallas and Harris counties in Texas, and Fulton County in Georgia. It also found them in majority-minority counties such as Montgomery County in Alabama, Cook County in Illinois and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. Michigan got the most: 71 monitors across eight counties. Courthouse News, reading the same list, reported that the monitors were sent largely to jurisdictions that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and are populated by Black and Latino voters, with Michigan and Texas listing the most.
The department’s defense is that this is routine. “Our monitors only observe and take notes,” it told Pennsylvania officials in a letter. Votebeat noted that both parties’ administrations have sent monitors for decades, that they may enter a polling place only with local permission, and that most monitoring passes without incident. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said that “election integrity has been one of the top priorities for this Administration and this Division.”
What is different is who is doing the watching, and why they were chosen. To reach 1,000, the department went beyond its Civil Rights Division and recruited criminal prosecutors and other employees. Votebeat reported that an FBI agent was part of the department’s monitoring at Arizona’s primary. The Trump administration has also repeatedly made claims about noncitizen voting that election officials and courts have not borne out, and the monitors went out after the department had already threatened election workers with prosecution until a judge ordered it to stop.
Lawyers for the NAACP argued in court that the “unprecedented deployment” of federal officials could interfere with the right of voters to cast ballots without intimidation. The concern is not abstract for Black voters. Officials watching Black voters line up is an old tool of suppression, and the Voting Rights Act exists because of it. In Pennsylvania, a coalition of clergy asked county officials to keep federal monitors away from voting sites, telling Word In Black they feared the presence alone could chill turnout.
The first test came in Michigan, where state officials called the Justice Department after monitors asked poll workers for their training materials. Detroit and Flint, two of the state’s largest Black cities, were on the monitoring list.
Nobody has shown yet that the monitors stopped a single Black voter from casting a ballot, and we will not claim it. But a department that says it protects the vote chose where to put 1,000 people, and the places it chose were not random. The department says it will review what its monitors report after Election Day. Voters and the groups that watched the watchers should demand to see that review.
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