Washington — The Justice Department is planning to deploy a record 1,000 federal monitors to polling places throughout the U.S. for the midterm elections, the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division said this week.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, made the announcement in remarks to Bloomberg on Monday.
The Civil Rights Division has long sent out monitors to polling places throughout the country to ensure compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act. That law prohibits discrimination in voting and ensures voters are not intimidated or otherwise prevented from casting a ballot on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability or another protected class.
Historically, the Justice Department’s own Civil Rights Division attorneys and other staff have served as monitors, with some assistance from U.S. Attorney’s Offices to help augment the numbers.
In the most recent midterm election in 2022, there were slightly fewer than 300 people sent to polling places, former officials told CBS News.
The 2024 presidential election involved a much larger effort, with the department sending an estimated 700 people to monitor compliance with federal voting laws across 27 states in 86 jurisdictions, former officials said.
The majority of those 700 were DOJ attorneys and staff. A smaller percentage were part of the separate, and largely diminished, federal observer program administered by the Office of Personnel Management that recruits and trains volunteers to watch, listen and take notes at specific polling sites covered by court orders.
It remains unclear how the Justice Department will be able achieve sending 1,000 monitors for the upcoming election, an effort that requires an extraordinary amount of planning and preparation.
The Civil Rights Division under the Trump administration has been largely gutted. More than 70% of its career staff took early retirement or resigned amid concerns about changes to its mission under Dhillon’s leadership. Although she has since recruited more attorneys, it remains understaffed.
A DOJ spokesperson told CBS News that the department will seek federal employees to volunteer for the poll-monitoring effort. A department official added that the recruitment will target DOJ employees, including people in U.S. Attorney’s Offices.
A full list of locations is expected to be made public once the primaries are concluded. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it was sending monitors to polling places for primary elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and Laramie County, Wyoming.
While it is longstanding practice for the DOJ to send monitors to polling places, some states are more suspicious this year, given the 31 lawsuits the Civil Rights Division has filed seeking states’ unredacted voter data. The division has said it wants to ensure each state’s rolls are clean, and that noncitizens are not registered. The states argue the suits are an effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the election process itself. The government has not prevailed in a single lawsuit so far, with judges blocking the requests for data in 23 cases to date.
The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, wants to use the voter information to carry out criminal and immigration enforcement.
President Trump, for his part, has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, and claimed without evidence that it was stolen. The FBI has since launched a number of criminal investigations related to the 2020 election results, including in Fulton County, Georgia, and in Arizona.
Recently, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes filed a public records request in the hopes of learning why DOJ was deploying monitors in three counties to monitor its primary election.
