Past midterm and presidential deployments fell well below 1,000
The Justice Department aims to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors at polling places for November’s midterm elections, a target that voting rights experts and former department officials said the agency is unlikely to reach. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the department’s civil rights division, said the deployment would be “probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration.” The department said separately: “We hope to have the largest monitoring effort in the department’s history.”
Past deployments have fallen well short of that figure. The department sent 289 monitors during the 2022 midterms and 714 during the 2024 presidential election. So far in the current cycle, it has dispatched 75 monitors to more than 200 polling locations across five states — Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, Florida and Wyoming. Several California jurisdictions and a New Jersey county also received federal monitors during special elections late last year.
Whether the department can reach 1,000 in November is unclear. Scores of personnel have left the civil rights division under President Donald Trump. Election monitors require permission from local jurisdictions to enter polling places; in jurisdictions that decline, monitors must remain outside the 100-foot boundary that applies to members of the public not actively voting.
Voting rights experts said the target should not itself raise alarm. “This DoJ has amply earned the public’s distrust, but this announcement isn’t reason to freak out,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has worked on voting rights issues at the Justice Department and White House. “I’m skeptical they’ll actually get to 1,000. Even if they did, that wouldn’t be so different from the number in prior years; that’s a national number suitable for observing but not nearly enough to disrupt; and local election officials can, and will, toss anyone who makes trouble,” Levitt said. “As in the primaries, the most anyone should expect from this group is a handful of suits standing quietly in the back of the room.”
A former Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions, was similarly doubtful. “For decades, DoJ has sent hundreds of monitors and attorneys to polling places during each federal election,” the former official said. “In the last year, DoJ has sent monitors to off-cycle and primary elections, and they have done little to nothing.” The former official added: “DoJ may try to send 1,000 monitors into the field this November, but they probably won’t be able to coordinate a deployment of that size. Even if they manage the logistics, 1,000 DoJ monitors will only give us more videos of lawyers standing around with clipboards, following instructions from poll workers and being ignored by voters.”
State and local officials in several states that hosted federal monitors this cycle told The Guardian they were unaware of any disruptions, though several declined to comment. In Minnesota — where a federal immigration enforcement operation earlier this year resulted in two people being killed and thousands deported — state officials organized their own observation of federal monitors during the state’s primaries earlier this month. Steve Simon, Minnesota’s secretary of state, estimated six or seven teams of two to three federal monitors operated across Hennepin and Ramsey counties, home to Minneapolis and St Paul, on primary day. The monitors provided real-time updates to the state attorney general’s office on where they were going and stayed a short time at each precinct, Simon said.
“There was no cat-and-mouse game. They were very straightforward about that,” Simon said. “And there were no major disruptions or obstructions.” A couple of instances in which observers came inside the 100-foot boundary, captured in a video from a local news outlet, prompted requests to move further out, Simon said. They complied.
Hennepin and Ramsey counties declined to allow the department to observe inside polling places, requiring monitors to remain outside the boundary. Joshua Yetman, a Hennepin county spokesperson, attributed the decision to concerns “about safety and the presence of federal officials in their communities.” “Although we have had no issues with previous DoJ election monitoring, we determined that prioritizing a safe, orderly and welcoming environment for voters was necessary this year,” Yetman said.
In California, the department sent one monitor to Orange county during a statewide special election in November 2025, county registrar of voters Bob Page said via email. “There were no concerns about the USDOJ monitor in 2025. He observed our vote-by-mail ballot processing operation over portions of three days. He was treated and allowed observation access the same as any member of the public when he visited our office.”
California Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber said in a press release that the department had not justified sending monitors to five counties in a non-federal special election. “We will not permit tactics masquerading as oversight to erode voter confidence or intimidate Californians,” Weber said. “Our voters have earned the right to cast their ballots free from surveillance or interference – from anyone. In California, election integrity is not a talking point; it’s a practice built on decades of professionalism and public trust. We intend to keep it that way.”
In Arizona’s Maricopa county, home to Phoenix, officials said federal monitors are routine. “We have monitors during most large elections,” said Jennifer Liewer, the deputy elections director for communications in the county’s elections department. In Pima county, where Tucson is located, monitors also came for the July primaries, and “the voters and poll workers did not report any concerns,” said Constance Hargrove, the county’s elections director.
After Dhillon cited unspecified “problems” in Arizona’s elections as the basis for sending monitors to three counties for July’s primary, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes filed a records request and wrote to the department seeking the underlying evidence. “We do not know what the Department considers those problems to be, in which jurisdictions they are alleged to have occurred, or what evidence supports them,” Fontes wrote.
The monitoring plan comes as the department has filed lawsuits seeking access to private voter data in several states. Trump has denied the results of past election defeats, including his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, and has in recent months signaled he may seek to intervene in November’s elections. Trump has said he wants the federal government to take over elections and issued executive orders toward that end; courts have largely curtailed those orders.
Should federal monitors return to Minnesota in November, Simon said, the state’s posture will be one of “trust, but verify.” “They say they’re here for a specific purpose. They have in the past been here for that exact same purpose. The purpose that they’re here for is a good one under the law,” Simon said. “So we hope and expect that they will, if they come here at all, continue to abide by the rules and laws.”