Justice Department poll monitoring puts county election officials on high alert

FBI’s Fulton County ballot seizure turned confiscation into clerks’ top fear

County election officials are on higher alert than they have ever been about federal poll monitoring ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks said. Parks, who has covered the voting beat for the last several election cycles, confirmed that about 15 counties in Democratic, Republican and politically mixed areas had received Justice Department notices of planned Election Day monitoring, and said that list “seemed to be growing in real time.”

Parks laid out the reporting and the officials’ concerns in NPR’s Reporter’s Notebook segment, credited to Gabriel J. Sánchez, in a conversation with host Sacha Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer noted at the top that a federal judge has ordered the Justice Department not to threaten election workers who are processing ballots cast by people the federal government claims are ineligible to vote, and that many election officials nationwide say the federal government is undermining trust in voting procedures.

The monitoring story began, Parks said, with a call from an election official he did not name, who said, “we got a notice, and people here are freaking out.” He said he then emailed and called every election official he knew, and everyone who knows election officials, to ask whether they had received a notice or knew of anyone who had.

The canvass produced two things, Parks said: a sense of where the notices were going, and a picture of how the requests were being received in those communities. What he kept hearing from voting officials, he said, was that they were hearing from voters, and that voters were nervous.

The Justice Department sends monitors out in every election, Parks said, but this year feels different to the officials receiving them. He cited what he called a number of unprecedented department actions during Trump’s second term: lawsuits against states seeking access to sensitive voter data, and presidential executive actions struck down by courts for overreaching the president’s authority. Against that landscape, he said, a county voting official’s unease at the department coming to local voting locations runs higher than it otherwise would.

At least one recipient went on the record. Parks said a Democratic election clerk told him the notifications are politically motivated and potentially an intimidation technique. He said many others voiced similar concerns on background and off the record, describing an environment in which “everyone is very nervous right now” to be under the scrutiny of the Trump administration.

The fear has recent precedent, Parks said. He pointed to the 2020 cycle in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona, where election officials in places where the Trump campaign and people spreading election misinformation were focused confronted death threats and political pressure.

The clerk who spoke on the record, Parks said, made what he called a calculated decision to talk, knowing it would become public that the Justice Department was coming to his county. His county’s situation illustrates the unease: it has a heavily Latino population and provides Spanish-language ballots, while its neighboring clerk, a Republican, received no monitoring notification.

Under the Voting Rights Act provision the department cites, Parks said, jurisdictions where census data show certain percentages of residents of different ethnicities or races may be required to provide ballot materials in those languages. The Justice Department has said it is coming to the county because it is interested in enforcing that specific requirement. But Parks said the clerk was not comforted by that explanation, because the department has not shown any previous interest in enforcing ballot protections for people who speak Spanish.

Asked what clerks fear the monitors might actually do, Pfeiffer summarized the concern as scrutiny of Latino voters and possibly their detention, and Parks agreed that is the underlying fear. He noted the same department sent monitors to close to a dozen states during this year’s primaries and that, on the whole, that effort was uneventful, with many states finding no issues at polling places or election offices. The exception came in Wyoming, where the Republican governor and the Republican clerk said monitors were, in their words, “aggressive,” and did not seem to show respect for state law around elections. Broadly, Parks said, officials expect this monitoring effort to go somewhat as normal, but they are on higher alert than they ever have been about it.

The concern that rises above all others, Parks said, concerns federal law enforcement rather than the monitors: the idea that federal agents could obtain a search warrant and take possession of ballots. That possibility was not on local election officials’ radar until this year, when the FBI served a search warrant at the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office, an area Parks described as an epicenter of conspiracy theories around the 2020 election, and confiscated ballots as part of what Parks said was an investigation into recordkeeping crimes. The seizure came years after the votes were cast, and Parks called it unprecedented.

Clerks now describe a scenario they have been planning around all year, Parks said: it is November 5, the count is not finished, absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day have not yet been tallied, and federal law enforcement arrives at the door with a signed search warrant authorizing the seizure of ballots. Parks called that an outlandish scenario, but said election officials across the country have been preparing for it all year. Asked whether officials would share his characterization, he said: “Feels less outlandish now than it ever has before.”

Parks said every recent election cycle has produced a different “red blinking light” concern. After Russian election interference in 2016, counties spent four years focused on cybersecurity and hardening election systems. After 2020, the concern became physical security amid the threats of the intense period leading up to January 6. After 2024, he said, the new question is how to interact with a federal government led by a president who does not believe elections are legitimate.

The question Parks said he is watching longest is where Trump’s brand of election denial, which he said the president has been seeding in the American public for 10 years, goes next, and specifically whether it spreads among Democrats. He emphasized that election denial is being propped up on the right. But polling, he said, already shows many people on the left who believe a Republican victory in this midterm would come from some sort of fraud or malfeasance. With the House and U.S. Senate contests tightly fought, Parks said it would be naive to think that level of distrust stays isolated among a small portion of Republican voters while the entire electorate feels cynical, scared and existential.

Parks said he plans to spend Election Day at NPR headquarters, probably for 24 straight hours, and to travel on Wednesday afternoon and night, the day after the vote, to whichever contests remain unresolved.