The Justice Department is preparing to send a record 1,000 federal monitors to polling places for the 2026 midterms, the largest deployment of its kind in the agency's history. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs the Civil Rights Division, gave the number to Bloomberg last week and the figure alone tells you how central "election integrity" has become to this administration's second-term agenda.
This is not unprecedented. The Civil Rights Division has monitored polling places for decades under the Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination, intimidation, or obstruction of voting based on protected characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability.
According to the Department of Justice, "The Voting Rights Act permits federal observers to monitor procedures in polling places and at sites where ballots are counted in eligible political subdivisions."
The Division determines whether federal observers are needed in an eligible jurisdiction. If so, the Division notifies the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that federal observers are needed, which OPM recruits, and then, in cooperation with Division attorneys, supervises federal observers. Federal observers write reports of the activities they witness in polling places and p
