Justice Department notifies counties of planned Election Day monitoring

States learned of monitor sites after counties, officials say

The Justice Department began notifying counties this week that it wants to monitor elections on Election Day, opening what NPR described as a growing list of potential monitoring sites. Notices had reached counties in Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Texas and Washington.

The outreach did not identify a complete deployment. Spokesperson Kiersten Pels said the department would identify the jurisdictions and number of monitoring sites “closer to the election.” The Justice Department routinely observes elections and has long deployed monitors to ensure compliance with voting laws. Under President Biden, the Justice Department monitored 64 jurisdictions in 24 states on Election Day in 2022. NPR reported that the Trump administration’s “unprecedented steps to try to wrestle control over elections from local and state governments” had led to new concerns about Justice Department monitoring this year. NPR also reported that many local officials and experts considered this year different. At least one county official was raising questions about why his locality was on the department’s list.

Last month, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the department planned to send 1,000 observers nationwide. She called it “the largest monitoring effort” in department history. The announcement did not identify the November jurisdictions, and NPR reported that it remained unclear which places or how many the department would monitor.

Civil rights advocates also plan to send thousands of observers to midterm polling places.

During previous election cycles, state officials in states where monitors were assigned were notified at the same time as counties. This year, that did not happen initially, according to officials in three states who spoke to NPR anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the press. State officials have been scrambling since the county notifications began going out Tuesday to figure out where the Justice Department would monitor. After NPR asked the Justice Department why state officials had not been notified, multiple state officials said they then received notification.

NPR confirmed that the notices included Adams County in Colorado, seven counties in Texas, King County in Washington, Miami-Dade County in Florida, and Hennepin and Ramsey counties in Minnesota.

Adams County Clerk Josh Zygielbaum, a Democrat, said he was not surprised by the department’s decision because the county includes part of the state’s 8th Congressional District, a toss-up that could determine control of the House of Representatives next year. He was surprised that the department contacted only him and not the Republican clerk in neighboring Weld County, which also contains a sizable portion of the district.

“My initial thought is that it’s politically motivated, and that this is potentially an intimidation technique,” Zygielbaum said. “Although I like to assume the best in people, the administration really has shown its disdain for elections, particularly in states and counties where mail ballots exist.”

Pels said the department prioritizes places with competitive elections. It selected Adams County because Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act requires election materials to be available in the language voters speak. Weld County is not covered by that provision.

Zygielbaum said Adams County’s coverage reflects a higher proportion of Spanish-speaking voters who have a right to vote. “It still doesn’t put me at ease that it’s not a targeted visit,” he said.

NPR reported in September that Trump administration officials who had been assigned to noncitizen voting issues the previous year circulated a list of counties covered by Section 203, along with a Justice Department criminal checklist outlining requirements for prosecution of voter-related charges.

Colorado state officials were considering how to respond because state election rules require observers to receive permission from the secretary of state’s office unless a court orders their presence. “We are considering these requests in collaboration with the Attorney General’s Office,” said Jack Todd, a spokesperson for the Colorado secretary of state’s office.

Zygielbaum said his election processes would not change regardless of whether federal monitors received access. He has asked a state employee to attend on Election Day and keep watch if the Justice Department sends monitors. “I have lots of questions about why they’re there and what their ultimate intent is,” he said.

The Justice Department requested to send monitors to Hennepin and Ramsey counties during Minnesota’s August primary, but state officials denied them close access to polling locations. A spokesperson for the Minnesota secretary of state’s office said it was too soon to determine whether the state would make a different decision for the fall general election.

Most states reported no incidents involving Justice Department monitors during primary elections earlier this year. Wyoming’s Republican governor raised concerns about “aggressive” and “irregular” behavior during the August primary. The Republican clerk of Laramie County told NBC News that the monitors “showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections.”

The Justice Department disputes that characterization. “We disagree with the public framing that the two monitors we sent were ‘aggressive’ or did anything improper,” Pels said. She added that Dhillon had met with Wyoming officials after the primary.

Texas had similarly blocked the Biden-era Justice Department from monitoring elections in 2024. Ken Paxton, the state attorney general and current Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, went to court to stop monitors from entering polling and counting locations. Paxton said in a Nov. 5, 2024, statement: “The DOJ knows it has no authority to monitor Texas elections and backed down when Texas stood up for the rule of law.”

NPR reported that 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 cited by NPR worried that federal law enforcement could use those claims, or similar claims made this year, as a pretext to try to seize ballots during counting or interfere in the process in other ways.

The immediate unresolved questions are how extensive the notification list will become, how many jurisdictions the department will monitor and whether observers can enter polling and counting locations under state rules. Colorado and Minnesota had not settled their responses, while Texas had blocked a similar 2024 deployment. The county list NPR described as growing in real time had not become a complete roster.

Earlier, MSI reported on the Justice Department’s roughly 1,000-monitor target for November and the unresolved question of where its fall monitors would go. The new county notices supply initial destinations, but the full roster and monitoring count remain undisclosed.