Friday 23 October 2026
States prepare to shadow a surge of Justice Department election monitors, in the largest deployment in the department history
The Justice Department plans to send about 1,000 election monitors into all 50 states on Election Day, roughly triple the number used in the last midterm and the largest observation effort in the department history, Reuters reported. Minnesota and California are preparing to shadow the federal monitors with state employees of their own. Election Day is November 3, and control of Congress is at stake.
The federal monitors are coming in numbers no election has seen. The Justice Department plans to deploy about 1,000 monitors across all 50 states on November 3, roughly triple the deployment for the last midterm elections and the largest in the department history, Reuters reported this week.
Some states plan to watch the watchers. When Justice Department staff arrived in Minnesota this summer to monitor the state primary, they found state employees assigned to follow them. Minnesota deployed about 40 state workers, in pairs, to track the federal lawyers as they moved through two counties during the August vote. Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said his office will likely keep coordinating with the state attorney general to shadow the federal teams during the midterms. California has started a similar program.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta put the state position bluntly in an interview with Reuters. They are the source of interference, he said, speaking of the federal government. They are the ones that are intimidating and creating the suppression.
Justice Department officials answer that the critics are fear mongering. The department says the monitors will do what they have done in past elections, which is check compliance with federal civil rights law at polling places. The administration argues that a larger and stricter oversight effort is needed to hold public confidence in the count, and it has pressed states for voter registration data through the year.
The monitor fight arrives in the same week as the California ruling that barred Homeland Security from running voter fraud door knocks in nine states through Election Day, after a judge found the target lists were built on error prone data. Eleven days before the vote, the federal government and the states are litigating and posturing over who gets to stand inside the polling place, and both sides say the other one is the threat to a fair count.
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