WARNING: Something Disturbing is Coming to the Midterms

DOJ has not disclosed where the 1,000 people will come from—or exactly where they will be deployed. That unanswered staffing question is significant.

The usual DOJ practice is to temporarily assign: Civil Rights Division lawyers and staff; lawyers from U.S. Attorney’s Offices nationwide; and personnel borrowed from other DOJ components.

They ordinarily are civilian DOJ employees—not FBI agents, ICE officers, armed law-enforcement officers, or partisan volunteers. Because the severely reduced Civil Rights Division cannot supply anything approaching 1,000 people, DOJ would necessarily have to draw heavily from U.S. Attorney’s Offices and other divisions. Campaign Legal Center describes monitors as DOJ employees, while current reporting says the precise composition remains unknown. Democracy Docket

There is also an important terminology problem. Dhillon announced “monitors,” although some coverage calls them “observers.” They are legally different:

DOJ staff monitors are departmental personnel dispatched to gather information and assess compliance with federal law.

Federal observers are specially authorized under the Voting Rights Act and historically furnished and trained through the Office of Personnel Management.

The statutory observers have a clearer legal basis for entering polling places. Ordinary DOJ monitors may be restricted by state law and cannot automatically demand entry. Neither category administers elections, determines voter eligibility, directs poll workers, or decides whether ballots count. DOJ’s official explanation

Is this “business as usual”? Only partly. DOJ election monitoring itself is unquestionably traditional. The Biden DOJ monitored 86 jurisdictions in 27 states in 2024, and in 2012 DOJ deployed more than 780 observers and other personnel. DOJ’s 2024 announcement But Dhillon herself called 1,000 “probably” a historic Republican-administration deployment, and DOJ has not disclosed the jurisdictions, personnel, selection criteria, or operational instructions. The Washington Post

What makes this deployment especially concerning is its surrounding context:

The primary-election deployments concentrated heavily on Democratic jurisdictions.
Dhillon has connected monitoring with alleged illegal voting and voter-roll “cleanup,” rather than limiting her explanation to traditional concerns such as racial discrimination, language access and disability access.

DOJ has threatened election officials with potential criminal liability.

It is simultaneously trying to obtain states’ unredacted voter databases.

On August 17, a Minnesota judge delivered DOJ’s 23rd district-court defeat in that campaign; the Sixth Circuit has also rejected DOJ’s statutory theory. Minnesota Attorney General, Reuters on the Sixth Circuit decision

The plausible “after Election Day” concern is that monitor reports could supply selected anecdotes, declarations or investigative referrals that DOJ could use to support subpoenas, prosecutions or litigation—or simply to create a public narrative that particular Democratic jurisdictions conducted unreliable elections. That is a credible risk, given the administration’s stated priorities, but it is not yet proof of a predetermined scheme. Monitors themselves cannot invalidate ballots, alter totals or overturn an election.

So Elias’s alarm is not baseless, but the most precise conclusion is:

The existence of federal monitoring is routine; the proposed scale, unexplained staffing, partisan-looking targeting, altered enforcement rationale and integration with DOJ’s voter-data campaign are not routine.

The most revealing information will be the eventual jurisdiction list, the monitors’ home offices, their written instructions, whether armed agents are included, where they are permitted to stand, and what happens to their reports after Election Day.

I expect those election monitors will come from a database of trump supporters.