Justice Department To Send About 1,000 Election Monitors; Oregon Publishes The Limits

The Justice Department has told Oregon that federal election observers will be in Multnomah County on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, and the state has answered by publishing, in writing and in advance, the limits on what those observers may do. The department’s Civil Rights Division notified the state on Thursday, October 22, according to the Oregon Secretary of State’s office, which set out its position in a press release on Friday, October 23.

Oregon is one of at least ten states the department has notified that monitors are coming. The others named are Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Utah and Washington. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has said the department plans to send about 1,000 monitors nationwide — about triple the deployment in 2022 and the largest in the agency’s history. This year, the department is also deploying criminal prosecutors as monitors, a departure from past practice.

Federal election monitors are not election officials. They do not register voters, hand out ballots, run polling places or count votes. Their role, as the department describes it, is to observe whether elections are run in compliance with federal law — the body of voting-rights statutes the Civil Rights Division enforces — and to report what they see. Deployments are announced to state and local officials in advance, as Oregon’s was, and the monitors’ presence in a county is a notice that federal observers will be watching the process on Election Day, not that the federal government is taking any part of it over.

What Oregon Says The Monitors May Not Do

Secretary of State Tobias Read said Oregon welcomes lawful observation of its elections, and then listed the boundaries. Federal observers, his office said, may not talk to election workers, handle ballots, photograph sensitive information, inspect equipment or enter restricted areas. The press release added that Justice Department monitors “have no special authority” in the places where votes are cast and counted.

Oregon votes by mail, and ballots are received and processed at county election offices, including Multnomah County’s — the state’s most populous county, and home to Portland. The limits the state published speak to that setting: observers may watch, but the handling of ballots and the operation of the count remain the work of county and state election officials, and the state has put the department on notice of the lines before the monitors arrive rather than after any dispute.

The Wyoming Episode

In setting out the rules, the secretary of state’s office pointed to Wyoming’s primary on August 18, where, it said, two Justice Department monitors behaved in ways the office described as “irregular” and “a bit aggressive.” The office cited the episode as background for publishing Oregon’s ground rules ahead of time. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon also issued a statement on the planned deployment.

The Justice Department has sent election monitors into the states for decades to watch for violations of federal voting-rights law. The observers do not run any part of an election; they observe and report. What is new this cycle, by the department’s own account and the state’s, is the scale — about 1,000 monitors, roughly triple the 2022 deployment and the largest the agency has fielded — and the makeup of the teams, which this year include criminal prosecutors alongside Civil Rights Division personnel. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.

Sources: Oregon Secretary of State; Salem Statesman Journal; Campaign Legal Center.