The DOJ is quadrupling its election-monitor deployment for the midterms, and Democrats say it could intimidate voters. One reporter who's done the job says the biggest threat it poses is boredom.
The Justice Department is preparing to deploy as many as 1,000 election monitors to polling places nationwide during the November midterms — nearly quadrupling its 2022 effort and topping the 714 sent during the 2024 presidential election — under an initiative led by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon.
The Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to polling places for decades to enforce the federal Voting Rights Act, which bars voter intimidation and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, disability or other protected characteristics. In 2022, the department sent 289 monitors; in 2024, that grew to 714 across 27 states and 86 jurisdictions.
The scale of the 2026 deployment has drawn pushback from Democrats. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche demanding safeguards, warning that federal personnel stationed at polling places — especially amid the administration’s public claims about fraud and foreign interference — could create “an atmosphere of suspicion and intimidation.” He asked DOJ to detail how monitors will be selected, trained and limited in their interactions with voters and poll workers.
Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., was more direct, saying last month that any such attempt is part of Donald Trump’s efforts to intimidate eligible voters.
The monitor announcement follows a separate, contentious DOJ push this year to obtain unredacted voter rolls from roughly 30 states — an effort that has gone 0-for-nearly-two-dozen in federal court, with no judge yet siding with the department.
Full disclosure, from this reporter: I’ve worked in that exact role — a federal election monitor stationed at polling places to watch for voting-rights violations. In practice, nobody asked who I was or what I was doing there. No badge waved, no lanyard explained, no announcement made. If federal monitors quietly standing in a corner of a polling place amounts to voter intimidation, it’s a strange kind of intimidation that goes almost entirely unnoticed by the people it’s supposedly meant to scare.
That’s not to say scale doesn’t matter — 1,000 monitors is a different proposition than a few hundred, and critics are right that the Trump administration’s rhetoric about fraud gives this deployment a different political charge than past ones. But the image of federal monitors as an intimidating show of force doesn’t match what the job actually looks like on the ground.
Sources:
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, “Krishnamoorthi Sounds Alarm Over Trump DOJ Deployments to Polling Places and Voter Suppression Risks,” Aug. 2026: https://krishnamoorthi.house.gov/media/press-releases/krishnamoorthi-sounds-alarm-over-trump-doj-deployments-polling-places-and
CBS News, “Justice Department to send a record 1,000 monitors...”: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-department-election-monitors-midterms/
The Hill, “DOJ deploying 1,000 poll monitors for midterms, official says”: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6035292-doj-deploys-poll-monitors/
Democracy Docket (opinion), “DOJ is 0-23 in court, so now it’s sending 1,000 monitors to the polls”: https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/doj-is-0-23-in-court-so-now-its-sending-1000-monitors-to-the-polls/
MS NOW, “The DOJ plans to send out 1,000 election monitors in November. Is that normal?”: https://www.ms.now/news/the-doj-plans-to-send-out-1000-election-monitors-in-november-is-that-normal
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