DOJ Sends Election Monitors To All 50 States, Judge Tells Them Not To Bring Guns

It’s Election Day morning, and the Justice Department put out a press release with some big news. For the first time ever, federal election monitors will be deployed in all 50 states. There are roughly 1,000 of them, in what the department calls the largest monitoring effort in its history.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, who rose to the job off of a career backing election denialism, expressed her delight:

“Election integrity has been one of the top priorities for this Administration and this Division,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. “I am very proud we are deploying the largest monitoring effort in DOJ history, and pursuing transparency for elections in an assertive and nondiscriminatory manner.”

Assertive is certainly one word for it.

On paper this sounds like good news. DOJ has sent monitors to the polls since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, and for most of that history they made sure local officials weren’t keeping Black voters from casting ballots. In a normal year, a bigger monitoring program might be something to celebrate.

But, you know, we live in the hellscape of 2026.

This is the year the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, which Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, called “this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” Voter suppression efforts are at an all-time high. The federal agency that is supposed to be the backstop hasn’t pushed back. It has spent the cycle adding to the pile.

The DOJ sued 30 states and D.C. to get unredacted voter rolls, complete with Social Security and driver’s license numbers. It has lost 27 of those cases and won zero, all while it couldn’t keep its own exhibits straight. It sued California to sideline roughly 20,000 mail ballots from people it calls “likely noncitizens.” A district judge said no, an appeals court said no, and the Supreme Court said no Monday night.

Meanwhile, an immigrant rights group’s analysis found 40% of the names on DOJ’s list weren’t on the voter rolls at all. The Civil Rights Division also sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning them about criminal liability. And Dhillon herself pitched the monitors as a way to make sure no citizen’s vote gets canceled out by someone who “should not be voting.”

So when this DOJ says “election integrity,” I am dubious they’re doing what the DOJ’s Voting Section (the unit created to enforce the Voting Rights Act) was built to do.

Then there’s the question of who, exactly, is doing the monitoring. Since January 2025, the Civil Rights Division has lost roughly three-quarters of its attorneys. All but two career lawyers have left the Voting Section. So to get to 1,000, DOJ said it would bring in employees from the Bureau of Prisons, DEA, ATF, and CBP. That led the NAACP to sue, arguing that the plan violates Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which bars any “person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise” from intimidating voters. At a hearing Monday, DOJ abruptly said it would have “no problem” with an order keeping law enforcement agents away from polling sites. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, warned the government that if its representations turned out to be false, “obviously there’d be hell to pay.” The same hearing also produced an official’s estimate that the real number of monitors was closer to 900, because DOJ was having trouble finding and training people in time.

Late Monday, Walton declined to issue an injunction. He didn’t think he needed one, because he was taking DOJ at its word. Then he ordered the department to stick to that word. Then again, it’s not a great sign when a federal judge has to put “will not be armed with a firearm” in writing about your election monitors.:

“While the Court does not think that such an injunction based on the defendants’ representations is necessary, the Court will order that the defendants comply with their counsel’s concession that they will take action to ensure that the monitors participating in the DOJ’s Poll Monitoring Program are indeed administrative or clerical personnel and not law enforcement officials, will not be in uniform or display any other insignia indicating their affiliation with a federal agency, will not be armed with a firearm, and will not have the power to effectuate arrests,” Walton wrote.

Aw, Judge Walton, you dear, sweet summer child (weird thing to write about a 77 year-old man, but here we are). Judge Ana Reyes spent months doing the exact same thing, trusting DOJ lawyers to warn her before anything irreversible happened. Then the government chainsawed its way around her notice requirements, and last Friday she opened a formal inquiry into whether those lawyers lied to her. This DOJ has racked up benchslap after benchslap for ignoring court orders and lying to federal judges, so taking it at its word on Election Day is certainly a choice.

The primary season was the dress rehearsal, and it went about how you’d expect. In Wyoming, monitors improperly sought access to voting machines, which the state’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, called “very odd.” In Maricopa County and Minnesota, the monitoring team included David Michael Levin, a lawyer who pleaded guilty in 2016 to hacking election websites.

The release does mention that the Division’s Criminal Section enforces federal laws against voter intimidation and voter suppression. It also advises that “Complaints related to violence, threats of violence or intimidation at a polling place should be reported immediately to local police authorities by calling 911.” That’s good advice. It just sounds a little different coming from a department that, in a filing on Monday, argued that the Voting Rights Act’s ban on voter intimidation doesn’t apply to the federal government.

As Brennan Center senior counsel Harry Black pointed out, 1,000 monitors spread across more than 95,000 polling places means “the math just ain’t mathing,” and a few hundred federal employees won’t swing an election. But nobody nervously watching the returns tonight is going to sleep better knowing the Justice Department is out there taking notes.

Earlier: DOJ Can’t Keep Its Own Cases Straight While Suing 30 States For Messy Voter Rolls
Ninth Circuit Bats Around DOJ Lawyer In CA ‘Emergency’ Vote Purge
‘You Did Your Absolute Worst’: Judge Delivers Epic Benchslap Over Trump Golf Course Chainsaw Spree
DOJ Demands Judge Recuse Herself For Inappropriate Noticing They Broke The Law
Brutal, Humiliating Benchslap Puts An End To Lindsey Halligan Experiment
‘Don’t Hide The Ball,’ Judge Puts DOJ’s Lawyers On Blast
District Judges Fight To Save The Rule Of Law While DOJ And Supreme Court Snicker
Senior DOJ Official And Right-Wing Lawyer Get In Hilariously Bitchy Twitter Slapfight