The Department of Justice will deploy federal election observers to monitor sites in Tuesday’s elections in California and New Jersey. This would usually be seen as a routine mission from the department’s Civil Rights Division, which is tasked with ensuring federal election laws are followed across the country. But the precise areas of deployment, the absence of clear federal authority to oversee these specific races and the questionable pretext for their deployment all set a disturbing precedent that will likely expand during next year’s midterm elections.
In late October, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the election monitors are necessary “to ensure the American people get the fair, free, and transparent elections they deserve.” The Justice Department staffers in question will be headed to five counties in California, including Los Angeles County, and one county in New Jersey. According to the DOJ’s release, the staffers will facilitate “an open flow of communication between poll observers and election monitors to ensure that elections proceed with a high degree of security.”
The two states where DOJ observers will be present don’t have elections with any federal component that would invite Bondi’s intervention.
But under the Constitution, states are charged with conducting elections, with federal laws only rarely superseding that authority. The two states where DOJ observers will be present don’t have elections with any federal component that would invite Bondi’s intervention. California voters will decide whether to amend the state’s constitution to shift control over congressional redistricting away from an independent commission and back to the state legislature. The move from Gov. Gavin Newsom comes in response to a White House-backed pro-GOP gerrymander in Texas earlier this year. While there are federal implications, it’s still a statewide election. Meanwhile, New Jersey is holding state legislative and gubernatorial elections. In the latter, Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill leads Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the mid-single digits in polling averages, but some surveys show a closer race.
Instead, the Justice Department chose to involve itself in the proceedings only after a request from each state’s Republican Party. The New Jersey GOP requested that DOJ staffers be present in Passaic County to “oversee the receipt and processing of vote-by-mail ballots” and “take steps to monitor access to the Board of Elections around the clock.” In the letter to Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the New Jersey GOP claimed this was necessary because of a “long sordid history of [vote-by-mail] fraud,” referring to an ongoing fraud case in a 2020 city council race. It’s worth noting that Passaic County was a former Democratic stronghold that swung to Trump in 2024 — and is home to a sizeable Latino community — making it potentially crucial to Ciattarelli’s victory.
Similarly, according to NBC affiliate KCRA, California GOP chairwoman Corrin Rankin wrote in a letter to Dhillon expressing concerns Orange and Los Angeles Counties that “arise from their voter list maintenance practices—Orange County is currently in litigation with the Department of Justice over its voter list and there are questions about the accuracy of the voter rolls in Los Angeles County, as well as that county’s compliance with a settlement reached with Judicial Watch.”
The ongoing litigation that Rankin referred to is being waged across the country after a demand from Bondi for states to turn over sensitive voter information including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Among the six states facing Justice Department lawsuits is Pennsylvania; its Republican secretary of state, Al Schmidt, called the lawsuit “unprecedented and unlawful” and promised to “vigorously fight the federal government’s overreach in court.”
As The Associated Press reported, the sudden interest in these specific off-season elections has experts skeptical about the Justice Department’s decision and the effect of the monitors:
David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who has served as an election monitor and trained them, said the only federal laws the department has the jurisdiction to enforce in state elections are ones that prevent discrimination against racial minorities. “It’s a very high bar to justify Washington’s intervention into state-only elections,” said Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Integrity & Research. Still, Becker said that if monitors obey rules about not interacting with voters, poll workers or ballot counting, “I don’t think this is going to make any difference for voters.” It’s also true that the laws allowing federal election observers to be deployed at all are limited to ensuring anti-discrimination laws are upheld. And even then, the deployment must take place under a court order, which the administration lacks in both New Jersey and California. With Bondi and Dhillon running the show at the Justice Department under President Donald Trump, the usual rules may not apply. But with Bondi and Dhillon running the show at the Justice Department under President Donald Trump, the usual rules may not apply. After all, working within the exact spirit of the law, let alone the letter, hasn’t been this administration’s preferred approach. Here, Bondi and Dhillon are following Trump’s marching orders in his war on early voting and mail-in ballots. That will likely set up a clash with state election officials, especially when you consider that more than 80% of Californians voted by mail in 2024. Crucially, Dhillon has worked to invert the Civil Rights Division’s priorities from ensuring access to the polls to using it as a tool that could hinder certain undesirable voters from casting ballots. The department’s suggestion that the monitors will be working closely with poll observers recalls the army of GOP observers trained last year to add weight to Trump’s frequent (and unproven) claims of voter fraud. And as my colleague Steve Benen noted last week, there’s plenty of evidence that the MAGA acolytes are gearing up to be even more aggressive during the midterms. The slew of election deniers now being put in place in key roles around the country, paired with the Justice Department’s groundwork to suggest fraud without evidence, portends a much more fraught election experience this time next year. The federal election monitors on the ground in California and New Jersey likely will not affect the results of Tuesday’s contests. But their presence both telegraphs a political message — a show of force to rally their supporters and cow their opponents — and could be used as justification for more overt intimidation in future elections.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
