The Justice Department is preparing to send a record 1,000 federal monitors to polling places for the 2026 midterms, the largest deployment of its kind in the agency's history. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs the Civil Rights Division, gave the number to Bloomberg last week and the figure alone tells you how central "election integrity" has become to this administration's second-term agenda.
This is not unprecedented. The Civil Rights Division has monitored polling places for decades under the Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination, intimidation, or obstruction of voting based on protected characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability.
According to the Department of Justice, "The Voting Rights Act permits federal observers to monitor procedures in polling places and at sites where ballots are counted in eligible political subdivisions."
The Division determines whether federal observers are needed in an eligible jurisdiction. If so, the Division notifies the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that federal observers are needed, which OPM recruits, and then, in cooperation with Division attorneys, supervises federal observers. Federal observers write reports of the activities they witness in polling places and provide those reports to the Division.
The pool of potential monitors is thinner than it used to be. More than 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division's career staff took early retirement or resigned amid the division's priority shake-up under Dhillon, and despite a recent hiring push, the office remains understaffed.
This represents a significant escalation of the use of election monitors compared to past elections. The Biden administration's DOJ sent 289 monitors to polling places during the 2022 midterms. Then, in 2024, the DOJ sent 714 monitors across 27 states and 86 jurisdictions, a majority of them Civil Rights Division attorneys and staff, with a smaller contingent drawn from the Office of Personnel Management's separate and largely diminished federal observer program, which trains volunteers to watch and take notes at polling sites under court order.
A DOJ spokesperson offered the outline of an answer to how they intend to pull off such a large increase in monitors, saying the department plans to recruit federal employees, including staff from U.S. Attorney's Offices, to volunteer for the effort.
According to CBS News, the Civil Rights Division has filed 31 lawsuits against states seeking unredacted voter data, arguing the requests are necessary to confirm voter rolls are accurate and that noncitizens are not registered. The states on the receiving end characterize the lawsuits as an effort to manufacture doubt about election administration rather than genuinely clean up the rolls. The DOJ has not won a single one of the 31 lawsuits, and judges have blocked its data requests outright in 23 of them.
The broader push fits into President Trump's second term agenda, which has made election integrity a signature priority, most visibly through his backing of the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a valid photo ID to vote in federal elections. The FBI has also opened a string of criminal investigations tied to the 2020 presidential election, including in Fulton County, Georgia, and in Arizona, keeping that election in active legal limbo nearly six years later.
Supporters of the monitoring surge will call it overdue vigilance against a system Republicans have long argued is vulnerable to fraud and administrative sloppiness, as was recently uncovered in New Jersey, where more than 6,000 noncitizens were found on the voter rolls. However, critics will call it a pretext for a federal presence at polling places, timed to a midterm cycle in which control of Congress hangs in the balance.