The Department of Justice this week began notifying the counties it wants to monitor on Election Day, NPR has learned. Counties in Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Texas and Washington have received notifications from the Justice Department so far, but the list seemed to be growing in real time. The department has long deployed monitors to ensure compliance with voting laws, but the Trump administration's unprecedented steps to try to wrestle control over elections from local and state governments have led to new concerns about DOJ monitoring this year.
And already this week, at least one county official is raising questions about why his locality is on the DOJ's list. Last month, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said the department planned to send 1,000 observers nationwide, in what she termed "the largest monitoring effort" in DOJ history. And even as counties are being notified, it's unclear which jurisdictions or how many the department plans to monitor this November.
A DOJ spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, told NPR those details will be shared "closer to the election." The Justice Department routinely observes elections. The department under President Biden monitored 64 jurisdictions in 24 states on Election Day in the last midterm year, 2022. But to many local officials and experts, this year is different.
President Trump continues to falsely maintain that he won the 2020 election and that election fraud is more widespread than it has ever been proven to be. Experts worry federal law enforcement could potentially use those false claims — or others generated this year — as pretext to try to seize ballots during the counting period, or interfere in the process in some other way. Most states reported no incidents with Justice Department monitors during primary elections earlier this year, but in Wyoming, the state's Republican governor expressed concern about "aggressive" and "irregular" behavior by monitors for the state's August primary.
And the Republican county clerk of Laramie County told NBC News at the time that the conduct of the monitors "showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections." The Department of Justice disputes that characterization. "We disagree with the public framing that the two monitors we sent were 'aggressive' or did anything improper," Pels said, adding that Dhillon had a meeting with the Wyoming officials after the fact. In previous election cycles, state officials in the states where monitors were assigned were notified at the same time as the counties.
This year, that did not happen initially, according to officials in three states who spoke to NPR anonymously because they weren't authorized to speak to the press. So states have been scrambling since the notifications began going out Tuesday to figure out where the DOJ plans to be. After NPR asked the DOJ why states had not been notified, multiple state officials told NPR they then received notification from the department.
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