Why Are Federal Election Monitors Coming To NJ?

BY: Benjamin J. Hulac, Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON — The federal Department of Justice is within its legal powers to dispatch election monitors to watch state elections, as it plans to do for state elections in New Jersey next week, following requests from Republican Party officials.

But nonpartisan election experts said the growing concern over federal monitors in New Jersey is understandable, given the department’s retreat during the second Trump administration from enforcing federal voting laws and the embrace of election denialism among top DOJ officials charged with carrying out federal voting law.

Last week, the department said it would send monitors to Passaic County and to five counties in California, which is also holding elections.

“The mere deployment of federal monitors is not out of the ordinary,” Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and election division at the Brennan Center for Justice, a legal and policy group based in New York City, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.

“It’s not a new thing,” he said. “Part of the reason people might not have heard about it, is that they don’t do much.”

On Monday, New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, a Democrat, called the move “highly inappropriate,” saying the Department of Justice hasn’t identified a legitimate reason for its involvement.

Passaic County is the core of the ninth congressional district, which split in 2024 — voting for President Donald Trump, a Republican, and U.S. Rep. Nellie Pou (D-9th).

Voters will select New Jersey’s next governor next week, along with an entire new state Assembly.

Under the Trump administration, the DOJ has dropped multiple lawsuits originally brought to protecting voting rights of people of color in Southern states.

In March, Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had directed the department to dismiss a challenge it had brought against Georgia’s election laws, which the Biden administration had argued were designed to restrict Black voters’ access to the ballot.

The civil rights division, the unit of DOJ tasked with enforcing bedrock election laws, like the Voting Rights Act, has seen a mass exodus of staff in the second Trump administration. And at a Federalist Society event this year, the heads of the civil rights division, conservative lawyer Harmeet Dhillion, compared the division’s work under Democratic administration to a speeding train.

Dhillion told that audience, a conservative legal group, her focus was to turn the train around entirely.

“There really hasn’t been a focus on turning the train around and driving it in the opposite direction. And that’s my vision of the DOJ civil rights [division],” she said. “We don’t just slow down the ‘woke.’ We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch’s goals.”

Dhillion and Alina Habba, a former personal Trump attorney acting as the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, could be involved in decisions about what forms election monitoring assumes next week in New Jersey and California, said Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center.

The civil rights division has lost more than 70% of its career staff and nearly the entire voting section, Baldwin said.

“The people who have the long-term commitment to nonpartisan enforcement, they’re not there anymore,” Baldwin said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “You barely have any people in the civil rights division to deploy.”

Baldwin, who worked within DOJ’s civil rights division, said the deployment of election monitors would typically be a ho-hum matter. But given Trump’s ongoing false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election, concern is understandable, they said. “I worry given the overall thrust of this department,” they said. “I don’t trust this Department of Justice.”

The DOJ monitoring program has historically been used to enforce federal election laws, often in efforts to stamp out racist policies. And it has been used to monitor New Jersey elections in the past.

“They have historically played a very important role in protecting voters from racial discrimination, from voter suppression,” Morales-Doyle said, adding that it’s highly unlikely voters will notice monitors at polling stations.

Talk about federal monitors as a serious, looming presence could scare off would-be voters more than monitors themselves, who often blend into the background on Election Day, said Morales-Doyle.

“Talking about it as if it’s going to be intimidating may be the thing that’s actually intimidating,” he said.

People should pay attention to other Trump administration moves, like DOJ lawsuits to obtain voting records, prosecution of Trump critics like Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-10th) and partisan gerrymandering efforts, he said. “The administration as a whole is engaged in a concerted campaign to undermine our elections,” he said. “I’m not sure the deployment of monitors is the place where people should be concerned.

Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment about why DOJ is sending officials to New Jersey or share any examples of voter fraud or intimidation.

Voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and New Jersey has safeguards in place to protect against voters abusing the voting system.

It is not clear if DOJ intends to send people to Passaic County under its election monitoring program or its observer program, which is more robust and empowers federal officials with greater legal authority.

Election monitors, unlike observers, for example, are not allowed to enter local polling places, though sometimes they are admitted in with the approval of local authorities.

The idea that voting fraud is real and a serious concern — something repeatedly debunked but nonetheless alive among Trump voters — could be used as a justification to pass laws that make it harder for people to vote, said Avner Shapiro, a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights and legal group.

“Is there going to be any intimidation of voters?” Shapiro, who worked for 28 years in the civil division, including on voting rights, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “Or is this going to be a pert for accusations of fraud?”

A summary from the Brennan Center of research on voter fraud shows fraud is extremely rare. “Voter fraud is not happening,” said Shapiro.