Justice Department To Send A Record 1,000 Monitors To Watch The People Voting

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department announced this week that it will protect the midterm elections by stationing a federal employee near roughly a thousand of the places where Americans are trying to vote.

The department will deploy about 1,000 monitors to polling locations this fall, which officials described as a record, and which the record confirms. During the last presidential election the previous administration sent monitors to eighty-six jurisdictions. During the one before that, this administration sent them to forty-four. The figure has now been rounded up to a thousand, an increase officials attribute to a deepened commitment to making sure the vote runs cleanly, and to being watched while it does.

The monitors, the department stressed, do not run elections, do not decide who is eligible, and do not direct local officials. They observe. They are there to confirm the process unfolds lawfully and, as a secondary benefit, to be visible enough that everyone taking part in the process is aware of being observed while they take part.

Officials presented the deployment as reassurance. A voter with nothing to hide, they reasoned, should welcome a federal presence at the door, the way a diner with nothing to hide should welcome an inspector who pulls up a chair and watches the meal. The comparison was offered sincerely and received nervously.

Supporters called it the most robust election-integrity operation in the department’s history. Others noted that integrity had long been measured by whether the count was accurate, not by how many people stood near it, and that a thousand observers guarantee mainly that a thousand observers were present. At press time the department was preparing to watch the election closely, thoroughly, and in numbers, which it assured the public was for their own good.