WASHINGTON — This summer, Minnesota paired up about 40 of its own employees and sent them out to follow federal election monitors around two counties during the August primary.
Not the voters. The monitors.
Steve Simon, the Democratic secretary of state, told Reuters the same setup will likely be back for Nov. 3, run with the attorney general’s office, while control of Congress hangs on the result. The federal staff in August caused no disruption, Simon acknowledged. California is doing something similar.
On Election Day the Justice Department wants about 1,000 monitors in all 50 states, Reuters reported. Roughly triple the last midterm. No monitoring effort in the department’s history has been that big.
None of this is entirely new, either. Department staff have gone to polling places for decades, checking for problems like a site with no Spanish-language ballots or one a voter in a wheelchair cannot get into.
The difference now is who runs it, and what they are looking for. Reuters reported that the Trump administration has remade the Civil Rights Division. Career staff have left. The emphasis has moved — toward election fraud, toward voting by noncitizens. Washington has also been pressing states to hand over voter-registration data, arguing tougher oversight is what it takes to make people trust the count.
Rob Bonta does not buy that. California’s Democratic attorney general, in an interview, called the federal government itself the problem. “They are the source of interference,” he said, referring to the federal government. “They are the ones that are intimidating and creating the suppression.”
Then there is the question of who shows up at the polls. Civil lawyers and support staff have usually done this work, partly out of a simple worry: put a criminal prosecutor next to a ballot box and some voters will get nervous. Using prosecutors would break with that. The NAACP has sued over it, asking a court to keep prosecutors and other law enforcement personnel out of the monitor role, and calling the plan voter intimidation.
Department officials call that fear-mongering. The work, they say, is the same as it has always been — compliance with civil rights laws. One senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details, said a voter would not notice any difference between a prosecutor and anyone else on the team.
“Monitors will not identify themselves as prosecutors,” spokesperson Pels said in a statement, arguing the NAACP lawsuit is based on “unwarranted fear and baseless speculation.”
Stacey Young has done this job herself. A former Justice Department lawyer and election monitor, she now runs Justice Connection, an advocacy group. “There’s never been a time when DOJ’s presence would have been viewed as this much of a threat,” she said.
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