DOJ To Send 1,000 Election Monitors To Midterm Polling Sites

Another day, another attempt by the Trump administration to interfere with the upcoming midterms. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, announced on Monday that the Justice Department will send 1,000 federal monitors to polling locations across the nation during the upcoming midterms. 

CBS News reports that Dhillon made the announcement during an interview with Bloomberg. During the interview, she said that the list of polling sites is still being determined and will likely be released once the primary period is over. Dhillon suggested that polling monitors will be sent to “places where there may be language issues, the places where there may have been access of disability rights issues, places where there may be voter fraud issues.”

And that last bit gives away the whole game.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed he lost the 2020 election due to voter fraud, but has not provided any substantial evidence that there was widespread voter fraud during the election. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud has seen him spend an inordinate amount of his second term trying to federalize elections. The Trump administration has filed tens of lawsuits to force states to send over unredacted voter rolls, and has so far lost 22 of them. 

Trump also tried to get the United States Postal Service to implement a rule that would have forced postal workers to toss mail-in ballots sent in states that have refused to send their voter rolls to the federal government. As you can imagine, the courts also shut down that effort as, believe it or not, the Postal Service has no authority over how elections are run. 

Dhillon’s announcement feels like the latest Hail Mary by the Trump administration to put their thumb on the scales of the 2026 midterms, as Trump and the Republican Party are deeply unpopular. 

It’s not uncommon for the Civil Rights Department to send election monitors to polling sites. During the 2024 election, the Justice Department sent out several of its attorneys to 86 jurisdictions across 27 states to ensure compliance with voting rights laws.

The number of monitors Dhillon is suggesting is what’s strange about the whole thing. The department typically sends its own attorneys to monitor polling sites, but given that 70% of the department’s career staff either took early retirement or quit as a result of Dhillon’s changes to how the agency runs, that won’t be the case this time around.

A spokesperson for the department told CBS News that they would be asking employees across the federal government to volunteer for the effort. The effort will focus on employees within the Justice Department, as well as the U.S. attorneys in the impacted states. 

My big question is: what exactly will these volunteers be doing or looking for? Dhillon has made it abundantly clear that the Civil Rights Department no longer concerns itself with civil rights violations concerning anyone who’s not a straight, white man. It feels less like this is about ensuring elections are conducted fairly, and more like another way for the Trump administration to sow doubts about the validity of the results. 

It’s truly absurd that the Trump administration would rather repeatedly lose in court and scramble to find election monitors as opposed to doing literally anything to help the working-class Americans who are being crushed under a weak job market and stagnant economy. You know, the whole thing that Trump was allegedly elected to do. 

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