DOJ Plans to Deploy a ‘Historic Number’ of Midterm Election Monitors

The Department of Justice is mobilizing a veritable army of election monitors in swing states across the country for this year’s midterm elections, Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, revealed in an interview this week.

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At least 1,000 Trump administration-trained and -approved workers will oversee voting in a number of precincts, a total that is“probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration,” Dhillon told Bloomberg on Monday.

The announcement comes after months of President Donald Trump repeating debunked claims of widespread voter fraud, a message that he has made central to his second term.

On Tuesday, the DOJ also announced that it would be conducting election oversight during primaries in Florida and Wyoming, both states with contentious House and Senate elections that could tip the balance of power in Congress.

Dhillon is a Trump ally who has been working on election monitoring for months. She was nominated by Trump in December 2024 and confirmed by the Senate in April 2025.

In a press release, the department noted that it has deployed over 75 monitors across five states — including the Michigan and Arizona primaries — at over 200 polling locations this primary season.

“Election monitoring is an ongoing priority for this office,” Dhillon said in a press release. “Nondiscriminatory monitoring ensures all elections remain free, fair, and accessible to all.”

In Tuesday’s primaries, the department will have approximately four Civil Rights Division attorneys monitoring polls in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and two Civil Rights Division attorneys in Laramie County, Wyoming.

In an interview with Bloomberg published Monday, Dhillon said the monitors being sent to polling sites are there to observe whether elections are being conducted fairly.

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Dhillon said the department’s actions are in tune with the administration’s policies and measures taken in previous elections. The training for potential election watchers would be the same used by past administrations, she added.

“We just did it in the primary. We will do it to the tune of approximately 1,000 election monitors in the November election,” she told Bloomberg. “This is something that DOJ does.”

Under former President Joe Biden, the department launched similar efforts, sending poll monitors to 22 states during the 2022 midterm elections and 27 states during the 2024 presidential election.

Dhillon has also mounted an ill-fated effort to obtain sensitive voting records from states — including nonpublic information such as partial Social Security numbers. She described it as an effort to make sure people are properly registered to vote, but the department has lost 23 out of the 31 federal lawsuits it filed against states and Washington, D.C., to force jurisdictions to hand over the unredacted voter registration data.

The effort remains ongoing.

Denied a high-profile courtroom victory, Trump has instead taken to pushing an elections bill called the SAVE America Act, describing it repeatedly as his highest priority. The act has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune has said the bill is effectively dead.

The measure would mandate that people provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and require states to implement photo ID checks at polling places. Democrats have harshly criticized the act, saying it would disenfranchise millions of Americans.

Trump has also refused to rule out declaring an election-security-related state of emergency before the midterms, though Dhillon said she has not been a part of those discussions.

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