The US Department of Justice plans to deploy about 1,000 personnel to polling places across all 50 states for the midterm elections on 3 November 2026, in what would be the largest election monitoring operation in the department's history. The plan, announced on 17 August by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, would roughly triple the 289 monitors sent in the 2022 midterms and exceed the 714 deployed in the 2024 presidential election.

What monitors do

Federal election monitoring dates back to the 1960s. Monitors observe compliance with federal voting rights laws, including accessibility for voters with disabilities and language assistance, and document what they see. They are trained not to intervene in the voting process. The department says this year's monitors will include civil rights attorneys, staff and federal prosecutors, and will go to every state, not only Republican or Democratic states.

Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News Sunday that claims the monitors will be armed are "completely false" and that they will be "the same monitors as in elections past." He said Congress should be "thanking the Trump administration for ensuring fair elections."

Pushback and lawsuits

Critics, including state officials and the NAACP, argue the unprecedented scale and the use of criminal prosecutors could intimidate voters and poll workers. The NAACP filed a federal lawsuit in early October demanding records about the programme's legal basis, staffing, training and site selection, after a Freedom of Information request filed on 1 September was acknowledged on 21 September without the records. Several Democratic-led states have set up their own oversight: Minnesota sent about 40 state employees in pairs to follow federal lawyers during its August primary, and California has established a similar programme.

Sources: Washington Examiner, The American Quorum