The Trump Justice Department plans to send an unprecedented 1,000 monitors to polling places on November 3. Now it's recruiting criminal prosecutors — people whose job is charging people with crimes — to fill those spots.

What's changing

The Washington Sun reported on October 6 that department leaders have asked lawyers and staff from across the Justice Department, including its criminal divisions, to work as poll monitors in November, according to internal emails the Sun reviewed.

A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed it: "department attorneys, including prosecutors, will serve as election monitors, as Department personnel have in many past elections." The spokesperson said the monitors won't identify themselves as prosecutors and must not interfere with voting.

That's a break from long-standing practice. DOJ poll monitors have historically been civil attorneys and non-attorney support staff. Their job was basic: checking that polling places had materials in other languages and were wheelchair accessible. They're trained only to watch, never to step in.

There's no rule against sending prosecutors. But the department has avoided it, former officials told the Sun, because prosecutors at the polls can scare voters and poll workers. A half-dozen former officials from the department's Voting Section said they didn't know of a single time prosecutors had been sent to the polls.

"We never did that, because if you introduce yourself to a voter and say, 'I'm a prosecutor,' that's just more intimidating," one said.

Stacey Young, a longtime former Justice Department attorney who now runs an alumni group, put it plainly: sending prosecutors "carries the real risk that election interference and voter intimidation will follow."

It already happened in Arizona

This isn't hypothetical. Public records obtained by the group Democracy Forward show at least seven criminal prosecutors worked as monitors in Arizona's July primary, in Maricopa and Pima counties. One was an FBI agent on a special assignment prosecuting violent crimes and hate crimes.

Local election officials in both counties told the Sun the monitors behaved normally. But Maricopa County's spokesperson said she hadn't known some of them were prosecutors.

Looking for "fraud"

The prosecutors are part of a bigger shift. Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump appointee who runs the Civil Rights Division, has said monitors will look for alleged fraud, not just voting-rights problems. Department messages during the primaries said monitors were there for "ballot security" and "ballot integrity" — work that normally belongs to the department's criminal side.

Some of the monitors it has already sent have raised alarms — for how they behaved at the polls, or for who they are:

• In Wyoming's August primary, the Laramie County clerk said two Justice Department monitors asked to examine ballot tabulators and training guides and wanted to know how new voting machines were bought — questions she said were outside the scope of voting rights law. Wyoming's Republican governor asked the state attorney general to look into it.
• One monitor in Fairfax County, Virginia, had been a Trump campaign lawyer in the effort to overturn Wisconsin's 2020 election results. At least two other monitors had worked on 2020 election challenges.
• Another, as we've reported, had pleaded guilty to illegally accessing Florida's election websites.

Most of the Civil Rights Division's current lawyers were hired after Trump took office, the Sun reports. Some former officials think that after a wave of firings and resignations, the department is turning to prosecutors simply because it doesn't have enough civil lawyers willing to do it.

What Republicans running this year have said

This is the backdrop for the federal presence some Republicans on this site have welcomed. New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte said she'd "welcome" them when the department sent monitors into Manchester and Nashua. John James bragged that his "friend Kash Patel" promised an FBI "presence" in Michigan before Election Day. And the administration has said armed ICE agents may enter polling places.

What we know

The Trump Justice Department is recruiting criminal prosecutors to serve among the 1,000 poll monitors it plans to send out on Election Day, and confirmed that prosecutors will take part. Former Voting Section officials say they know of no time prosecutors were used as monitors before, because their presence can intimidate voters. At least seven already monitored Arizona's July primary, and other monitors the department sent this year include 2020 election challengers and a man who pleaded guilty to breaking into election websites.

Source

DOJ Is Recruiting Prosecutors to Monitor Polling Places — The Washington Sun