The DOJ's "election monitoring" is really voter suppression
Trump's Big Lie has become government policy.
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Well, if you were wondering how elections would look during the second Trump administration, we’ve got our first inkling, and folks, it’s not great. In fact, it’s real bad.
Last week, the Department of Justice announced it will be monitoring elections in five counties in California and one in New Jersey.
• Passaic County, New Jersey
• Kern County, California
• Riverside County, California
• Fresno County, California
• Orange County, California
• Los Angeles County, California
You’ll note that the announcement offers no explanation as to why those particular jurisdictions were chosen or what authority the DOJ is invoking. Instead, we have an empty, meaningless statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi that this is necessary to “ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law.”
Let’s unpack the California jurisdictions first.
The administration very much does not want California to pull off the same redistricting trick that the GOP has already done in Texas and Missouri and is trying to do in Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska. This “monitoring” is a transparent effort to try to stop Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that would allow California to redraw its congressional maps mid-decade.
It must just be some crazy coincidence that the five counties the DOJ is targeting have some of the highest percentages of Hispanic residents in the state, with Los Angeles County and Riverside County county being the top two.
The California county with the third highest percentage of Hispanic residents is San Bernardino County. Why no federal observers there? Well, perhaps because it went for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. And while Trump didn’t carry San Diego County, which has California’s fourth highest percentage of Hispanic residents and also isn’t being targeted by the administration, he made significant gains there last year.
This, of course, is not how federal election monitoring has worked, ever.
“There’s going to be ICE officers near polling places. You damn right.”
The Voting Rights Act does allow the attorney general to deploy federal observers — though it is in no way clear if this is the law the DOJ is relying on. Past administrations have sent federal observers to monitor elections, but in those cases, the federal government intervened to ensure the right to vote was protected.
For example, in 2010, the Obama administration sent observers to 18 states to gather information about whether those jurisdictions were complying with the VRA’s requirements about providing voting information to non-English speakers and the right of disabled voters to receive assistance from a person of their choice to help them cast their ballot. The George W. Bush administration similarly sent observers to monitor compliance with minority language provisions in 2004.
Past federal efforts, therefore, focused on ensuring ballot access, particularly for non-white, non-English speaking voters. But Trump’s efforts focus on just the opposite: making it difficult or impossible for minority voters to cast a ballot. So the DOJ’s press release says nothing about discrimination and makes no mention of combating voter intimidation or voter suppression. Instead, it talks about transparency, security, public confidence, and protecting the votes of “eligible American citizens.”
None of this is related to the Voting Rights Act. On the contrary, these are all Trump fixations.
Trump has whined about noncitizen voting and voting fraud for three election cycles. In 2016, it was that millions of non-citizens had illegally voted, thus denying him the popular vote win. In 2024, it was that millions of non-citizens and ineligible overseas residents were going to illegally vote. And of course in 2020, it was non-citizens voting, voting machines flipping votes to Biden, fraudulent mail-in ballots, and so on.
Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, or what is left of it, is heading this corrupt effort. She’s very well suited for it. As co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, Dhillon pushed Trump’s Big Lie in 2020. As a private attorney, she routinely sued to limit, not expand, access to the ballot box. She’s in this job to roll back voting rights and ensure GOP victories.
Dhillon will be coordinating with the US attorneys in California and New Jersey, both jurisdictions where Trump has installed inexperienced hardline MAGA cronies as temporary US attorneys instead of getting Senate confirmation. In New Jersey, that’s Alina Habba, one of Trump’s innumerable personal criminal lawyers, and in California, that’s Bill Essayli.
In August, a lower court ruled that Habba wasn’t legally in her position, saying the series of temporary appointments Trump tried to string together to avoid having her go before the Senate violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. Essayli, who is also only in his job thanks to temporary appointment shenanigans, faces the same challenge. Nonetheless, here they both are in the DOJ’s press release, yammering about election integrity. There’s no risk that either of them would push back on this transparent attempt at intimidating voters.
And that’s all this really is.
Trump has been calling for an intimidating law enforcement presence at the polls for years.
During the 2020 election, he declared, “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have, hopefully, US attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals [sic]” at the polls to monitor for voter fraud. Never mind that voter fraud is basically non-existent, occurring at a rate of about 0.0003 percent. In a review of one billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014, an investigation found 31 instances of voter fraud.
Though the DOJ is vague about who, exactly, will be monitoring these polling places, Steve Bannon likely gave the game away back in August, saying, “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places. You damn right.”
The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority recently blessed the use of racial profiling by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Now, masked ICE goons can stop people to “investigate” their immigration status based on their race, whether they speak Spanish, speak English with an accent, where they are located, and what type of work they do. Combine that with the administration’s cavalier attitude toward arresting US citizens and what you have is a recipe where Hispanic voters who are citizens nonetheless avoid the polls for fear they will be brutalized or abducted by ICE.
While the goal in California is clearly to stop Proposition 50 from passing even though voters there support the measure by a large margin, in New Jersey, it’s about trying to tip the governor’s race. There, polls show Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, leading Republican Jack Ciattarelli by five to 10 points.
In Passaic County, the jurisdiction being targeted by the DOJ, Hispanics make up 42.7 percent of the population. Trump flipped the county in 2024 in no small part thanks to his inroads with Latino voters. However, Hispanic support for Trump is cratering everywhere, and New Jersey, where over 3,000 people have been arrested by ICE since Trump took office, is no exception.
As with California, keeping people away from the polls is the obvious goal here. If Hispanic voters are no longer in the GOP fold after watching Trump’s ceaseless, country-wide violence against immigrants, the administration’s solution is to make sure they can’t cast a ballot.
Ostensibly, both the California and New Jersey jurisdictions were chosen because the DOJ received letters about voting irregularities. Not, mind you, from anyone concerned about any sort of racial discrimination or suppression of the vote. No, in both instances, the DOJ received letters from state Republican parties alleging vague irregularities that just happen to be the things Trump fixates on, like voting by mail.
The DOJ doesn’t appear to have undertaken any investigation of the allegations in these letters, instead teeing up federal monitoring only a few days after receiving these totally legitimate and definitely independently-generated complaints. They want you to believe it’s just a wild, fortuitous coincidence that the allegations happened to correspond with places where the administration desperately needs fewer people to vote to win.
Brute force
It’s disgusting, but not surprising, to see conservatives pretend they care about the Voting Rights Act when they’ve been trying to undermine it for decades.
Their efforts at voter suppression got a huge boost from Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been committed to destroying the VRA since he was a wee babe. Indeed, Roberts’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder undermined the ability of the federal government to do actual, meaningful monitoring of elections.
Shelby County eliminated the VRA’s preclearance requirement, which had required certain jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to submit any election law changes to the federal government for approval. However, the preclearance requirement also formed the basis of determining which jurisdictions were subject to ongoing federal monitoring to deter discrimination. Once that requirement was gone, the DOJ could no longer send observers to those jurisdictions on its own initiative, but instead needed permission from the jurisdiction or a court order.
Republicans have been complaining about voter fraud for decades, using it as the foundation for things like voter ID laws. But under Trump, the complaints have coalesced into something genuinely unhinged. Because no one on the right will ever disagree with Trump, they’ve now had to adopt a wide variety of fringe conspiracy theories about elections just because their leader’s fevered brain cooked them up.
One of Trump’s biggest frustrations is that elections are run by the states, not the federal government. So it’s no surprise that the administration is trying to flex its muscle even when there is no federal election on the ballot. Why not start small and see how much they can intimidate just a few jurisdictions before really gearing up for 2026 and 2028?
Trump has already tried to impose his addled conspiracy theories on the states by issuing an executive order demanding that all existing voting machines be decertified, that all voters show a passport or similar identification, that states be forced to share voter data, and to restrict the availability of absentee voting.
But elections aren’t controlled by the president. Trump can issue executive orders all day long and they won’t have the force of law. However, if he can get his way simply by deploying some of Harmeet Dhillon’s stooges to different jurisdictions based on nothing but a vague complaint from Republicans, he basically can get his way by default.
Let’s close out with another unique little twist from the DOJ. Their press release claims these efforts are “aimed at promoting transparency and an open flow of communication between poll observers and election monitors to ensure that elections proceed with a high degree of security.”
What poll observers, exactly? Who can say? That phrase doesn’t appear in press releases about federal monitoring during previous administrations. Poll observers are generally partisans, observing on behalf of a political party or candidate. They are not supposed to be coordinating with the DOJ about anything, given that the election monitors are supposed to be neutral observers there to ensure ballot access. This looks a lot more like the DOJ giving an open invitation to Republicans to join in the shared project of suppressing the vote.
And why not? The administration isn’t even bothering to pretend to be a good-faith actor. Trump is using brute force to break elections in America — and the DOJ is happy to be along for the ride.
That’s it for today
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This isn’t election monitoring. It’s state-sponsored voter suppression dressed in bureaucratic drag.
ICE near polling places isn’t about transparency, it’s about terror.
The DOJ isn’t protecting the vote. It’s protecting Trump’s fixations.
We’ve moved from ballot access to ballot intimidation like in the olden days. From the Voting Rights Act to the Voting Fear Act.
Now the DOJ coordinates with poll partisans, not neutral observers…a behavioral inversion of every democratic norm.
This isn’t drift. It’s design.
And unless we ritualize resistance, the 2026 and 2028 elections won’t be contests.
They’ll be performances; staged under surveillance, sealed by suppression.
…PS, I’ve seen this before — in regimes where “election monitors” mean intimidation, not oversight.
When I served in the Foreign Service, we tracked governments that used law enforcement to suppress turnout and manufacture legitimacy.
Now it’s happening here.
Same tactics. Just better branding.
— Johan
I would assume that Gavin will have made plans to have support for his constituents in place to ensure that they are safe when going to their election sites (I live in Washington state which has used mail in voting for years, for which I am very thankful). The Republican tactic at this time- if you don’t believe you can win an election legally, then just break the laws to ensure a “win”