The Trump administration has notified Oregon election officials that it plans to deploy election monitors to Multnomah County on Election Day Nov. 3.
The notification was sent by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to the Oregon Secretary of State’s office on Thursday and drew immediate pushback.
The move is part of a much larger Justice Department election-monitoring deployment this year. The agency has been notifying jurisdictions in Colorado, Florida, Utah, Minnesota, Texas and Washington, among others, about its plan to deploy monitors.
Last month, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, announced plans to deploy 1,000 observers nationwide, calling it “the largest monitoring effort” in DOJ history. The department had already sent monitors — Justice Department attorneys and other Civil Rights Division personnel — to some states during the primary elections.
The planned deployment comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration’s Justice Department to increase federal scrutiny of state-run elections, including demands for voter-registration data and litigation over states’ voter rolls. Trump has also continued to question the reliability of voting machines and mail ballots and continued to falsely claim that widespread election fraud is a significant problem in U.S. elections.
The monitors would arrive just as Democrats appear to be well-positioned to retake the U.S. House and within reach of retaking the U.S. Senate.
Multnomah County said it’s aware of the Justice Department’s plans and routinely welcomes election observers of all political affiliations and backgrounds.
“We expect that our federal partners will be following our observer procedures just as we would for any group or individual,” said the county’s elections director Tim Scott.
Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said Oregon’s election system is reliable and warned that all election observers will need to follow the law.
“Oregon’s elections are secure, accurate and fair, and we always welcome observers to watch our American election process unfold,” Read said in a statement. “But let’s be clear: it is not legal for these observers or anyone else to interfere with Oregon’s elections – even the Department of Justice. We are prepared. We will follow the law, and we will make sure the Department of Justice does the same.”
Justice Department election monitors will have no special authority over elections in Oregon, Read said. They cannot enter restricted election facilities, inspect voting equipment, handle ballots or demand access to election records.
Election observers are allowed to observe election activities, document potential violations of federal voting laws and raise concerns with election officials. But they are prohibited from talking to election workers, interfering with conversations between election workers and voters, taking photos or videos of sensitive voter information or handling any ballots or official election materials.
Concerns about Trump’s monitors emerged after two Justice Department monitors displayed “irregular” and “a bit aggressive” behavior while monitoring poll workers during Wyoming’s Aug. 18 primary election.
The monitors reportedly sought to interview voters inside polling places, obtain poll-worker training materials, and examine voting equipment and tabulators. The Justice Department has denied that the monitors acted improperly.
Paul Manson, a research assistant professor at Portland State University, said congressional and Department of Justice observers have been part of election cycles for years, including in Multnomah County. They include congressional observers, who are appointed through Congress and may reflect partisan priorities, and DOJ observers who have commonly focused on voting access and civil-rights compliance. Observers are also common in countries with newer democracies, contested elections or concerns about democratic standards.
The concern is not the presence of election monitors but their motivation, said Manson, particularly given the reports coming out of Wyoming. Manson, who is also director for the Elections & Voting Information Center co-located at PSU and Reed College, said the Trump administration has not offered a clear rationale for launching such an extensive monitoring effort.
Earlier this month, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against Dhillon, seeking records about the deployment of the federal monitors. And at least two states, Minnesota and California, have already launched their own efforts to monitor the federal monitors.
“They’re motivated by something else that’s not traditionally been the scope of these observations,” Manson said, adding that he remains hopeful the DOJ is still acting as an independent law-enforcement agency.
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