The U.S. Department of Justice said it would deploy about 1,000 election monitors and observers across all 50 states on Tuesday, November 3, marking the first time its monitoring operation has covered the entire country.
The department said the teams would check compliance with federal laws protecting the right to vote. Those include the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and laws covering absentee voting by uniformed and overseas citizens, as well as other civil rights statutes. The Justice Department described the effort as the largest in its history.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division, said the agency was pursuing election transparency in an “assertive and nondiscriminatory manner.” The nationwide reach is a new scale for the operation, not the start of federal election monitoring: the department says it has monitored elections since the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965.
State rules shape where monitors can go
Deployment across all 50 states does not mean monitors will be present at every polling place or have unrestricted access inside voting locations. State and local rules govern access. In New Haven, Connecticut, for example, the state said the DOJ teams would have to remain outside the restricted 75-foot perimeter around polling places, according to the Connecticut Secretary of the State.
The department’s stated role is to observe compliance with federal voting protections. Its announcement did not say that monitors would be stationed at every polling site.
Nicole French