The head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division on Tuesday urged attorneys and staffers under her supervision to sign up as election monitors, in what appears to be part of a plan to deploy 1,000 monitors to polls in November.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, in an email to Civil Rights Division employees reviewed by NOTUS, said she was seeking attorneys and professional staff to fan out to an unspecified number of polling places around the country on Nov. 3 or work a call center in Washington.
The Justice Department has long sent federal election monitors to watch voting during primaries, midterms and presidential elections, and it’s typical for such internal recruitment memos to go out at this point in the election cycle.
But Dhillon’s note carries a heightened significance in light of her move to send an unprecedented number of monitors to polls.
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Dhillon told Bloomberg in an interview published Aug. 17 that the 1,000 monitors she hopes to dispatch would watch for compliance with voting accessibility rules and other civil rights issues within the Civil Rights Division’s purview — in addition to cases of election fraud, which has not historically been the division’s mandate.
She made no mention of those instructions in her email to staff Tuesday, saying only that the division “has the opportunity and obligation to ensure the upcoming midterm elections are free and fair.”
“As in prior elections,” she wrote, “our nationwide monitoring of the voting process on Election Day is essential to ensuring compliance with federal voting laws.”
She added a bolded call to action: “I’m writing to encourage each of you to sign up and join us in this effort.”
According to the email, those who sign up for election monitoring will be required to complete two short training sessions ahead of time, which has been customary for election monitors. Those who sign up for the Election Day call center must complete at least one training session. Monitors will receive their location assignments “a few weeks before the election,” the email said.
Anna Baldwin, a former attorney in the division’s Voting Section, who frequently deployed to serve in election monitoring roles, said the agency has always prioritized the assignments to voting locations. Those efforts focused on mundane oversight, such as whether locations were providing bilingual services when required to do so.
The DOJ’s monitors historically have spoken to voters who have left the polling stations to identify problem areas that could be addressed after Election Day, she said.
“There would not be this free-floating search for fraud that Harmeet Dhillon is citing for sending out this exaggeratedly large number of monitors,” Baldwin said.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying the department doesn’t confirm or discuss internal emails.
Other former Civil Rights Division officials questioned how the office would manage to recruit and train anywhere near 1,000 monitors in time to be sent to the field for Election Day.
The division’s staff has diminished significantly on Dhillon’s watch through firings and resignations. And nearly all of the roughly three-dozen attorneys and managers who served in the Voting Section prior to Trump’s second term have departed, draining the unit of important institutional knowledge, according to former officials.
“I worry about who will lead these teams and who will run these exercises, and what kind of experience and training they have,” said a former Civil Rights Division official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Across the division, NOTUS previously reported, a majority of current attorneys were hired since Trump took office last year. Many have ties to conservative organizations and offices, and some have a history of engaging in failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
If the DOJ sends out 1,000 monitors, former staff said some of that total would have to come from outside of the Civil Rights Division. Such an approach would be highly unusual, as the department has always preferred to limit its deployments to those with expertise in voting and civil rights law.
In response to a previous inquiry from NOTUS, the Justice Department said in an emailed statement that all election monitors would be drawn from within the federal government, but did not specify where. Officials are not recruiting from outside private groups, the department said.
About 700 monitors went out during the 2024 presidential election, when millions more Americans voted than are expected in the midterm elections, according to former officials. Most were from the Justice Department, while a smaller portion came from an Office of Personnel Management program that hires election observers to watch specific voting locations that are under consent decrees, settlements, or other court orders. In 2022, the previous midterm election cycle, about 280 monitors were dispatched to polls.
Employees can volunteer to either physically deploy to polling locations or work at an Election Day call center. In the former option, they will find out their location a few weeks before Nov. 3. In either case, they will retain their normal pay.
Dhillon’s monitor initiative comes amid a broader attempt by the Trump administration to crack down on what officials have referred to as widespread fraud in election administration and possible noncitizen voting, which experts say is extremely rare.
Under Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division has sued dozens of states that refused her requests to turn over full, unredacted copies of their voter registration data. So far, federal judges have ruled against the department in 23 of those cases and ruled in the government’s favor in none, according to tracking by the University of Wisconsin.
Some state and local officials, as well as outside election advocates, have raised concerns about the potential for a large volume of monitors to disrupt election administration or interfere with poll workers and voters, particularly if they receive instructions to investigate alleged fraud or other issues.
Just last week, Wyoming’s Republican governor asked the state’s attorney general to look into what he called “aggressive” behavior from DOJ monitors during the state’s primary. Debra Lee, the county clerk of Laramie County, told local media that two monitors had asked how the county acquired its election equipment, inquired about poll worker training and sought to examine tabulators. She said they also did not present their credentials until she asked for them and planned to interview voters at the polling place, which the county doesn’t allow.
The solicitation for election monitors has always been voluntary, former attorneys in the division said, though they added that current staff are likely to interpret the call differently after Dhillon has employed aggressive tactics of reassigning staff and firing career employees. Despite the pressure, there does not appear to be immediate enthusiasm for the assignments.
“No one I know wants to sign up for it,” said a current division attorney, who was granted anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
While Dhillon told employees they would go through two training sessions if selected for the deployments, the makeover of the division has created some concern about what those will now entail. The official who led those trainings for the last two decades joined the max exodus of staff under Trump.
In her interview last month with Bloomberg, Dhillon said monitors would be trained on the same materials used in previous administrations. Even if that’s the case, however, a different crop of Voting Section attorneys may be overseeing those who sign up to visit poll sites.
Former officials said that could create inconsistencies in what they look for and how they conduct themselves with election officials, poll workers and voters.
“I think we’re just going to see a broad range of behaviors,” a former Voting Section attorney said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “If it’s just two trainings and everyone’s pretty much new, people will have to resort to their own instincts in the field.”
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