Sen. Mark Kelly said the Justice Department’s plan to deploy about 1,000 election monitors for the midterms is “contradictory” to the founding generation’s decision that states, not the federal government, run elections, speaking at a campaign stop in Freeport, Maine.
“Our founding fathers made a decision that states were going to run the elections, not the federal government. So this is contradictory to that decision,” Kelly said at the event with Democratic candidates Troy Jackson and Hannah Pingree, according to C-SPAN’s video of the event. He first said it is “against the law for federal troops to be sent to polling places,” argued that a troop presence would be “rather intimidating” for voters, and then said, “the Department of Justice just said there yesterday, they’re going to deploy 1,000 poll watchers across the country. What’s that about?” He went on to say President Donald Trump “doesn’t like to lose elections,” recalled the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, and said he was in the building that day.
The Arizona Democrat’s wording equated the Justice Department’s planned personnel with “poll watchers,” a label that election officials commonly reserve for party-appointed observers rather than federal monitors.
DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels told States Newsroom on Monday that about 1,000 monitors would be involved across all 50 states for Election Day on Nov. 3, and that the department would not disclose the full list of monitored locations until that day, Stateline reported Tuesday. “Every monitor will merely observe and report any potential violations of federal law to the Department, which will be reviewed after Election Day,” Pels said in that statement. Stateline noted that the Justice Department for decades has deployed monitors, and that during the Biden administration the department sent monitors to 64 jurisdictions across 24 states for the 2022 midterms.
PBS News, citing a DOJ official, reported that this year’s effort would more than double the 388 people sent to polling places in 2022, that monitors include DOJ lawyers, that they would not be deployed to early-voting sites, and that a senior official said they are there to “observe and report,” with any enforcement after Election Day. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, interviewed for that PBS report, distinguished election observers authorized by federal statute or court orders from poll watchers appointed by political parties. By that distinction, the Justice Department personnel are monitors, not the poll watchers Kelly described.
State and local officials have begun announcing jurisdictions that will host monitors. Stateline reported planned or expected placements in King County, Washington; the Portland, Oregon, area; Salt Lake County, Utah; and Portland and Lewiston, Maine. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said the department offered assurances that monitors “won’t be approaching voters” and “won’t be wearing any sort of insignia.” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said her office “will monitor the monitors very carefully to ensure that they don’t cross any lines.” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab told PBS that monitors can enter a polling location like members of the public but cannot go behind the voter-ID checkpoint, and he called a large national expansion of little practical effect given the number of polling places.
Democrats and voting-rights groups have linked unease about monitors to other Trump administration election lawsuits. Stateline reported that the Justice Department has sued dozens of states seeking voter lists containing sensitive personal data, losing 27 cases and winning none as of that report; that it sued California over counting ballots from voters it called suspected noncitizens; and that it sued Alaska over certification rules in a same-name candidate scenario. The NAACP sued the department for records about the monitoring program, arguing an “unprecedented deployment” could jeopardize the election; U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan denied an emergency production order, Stateline reported, while the underlying case continues.
Kelly has separately pressed legislation limiting armed federal deployments at polls. On June 18, Sen. Elissa Slotkin introduced the Protect Our Polls Act with Kelly among the original cosponsors; the bill would require congressional approval and a detailed advance report before troops or armed federal personnel could be sent to polling places under the narrow armed-enemies exception in federal law. That bill targets military and armed law-enforcement deployments, not the civilian election-monitor program Pels described. In Maine, Kelly spoke about federal troops at polling places before turning to the Justice Department plan, but the department’s monitors are civilian staff, not troops.
The Justice Department says its monitors are a long-standing Civil Rights Division practice scaled up for 2026 and confined to observing possible federal-law violations. Harry Black of the Brennan Center told a University of Pittsburgh midterms panel, in comments Stateline quoted, that 1,000 monitors against more than 95,000 polling places counted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission for 2024 means the monitors could not interfere on a wide scale by numbers alone.
Kelly’s characterizations — that the DOJ plan is “contradictory” to the founders’ allocation of election authority to the states, that the personnel are “poll watchers,” and that Trump’s motive is that he “doesn’t like to lose elections” — are Kelly’s political argument. Pels’s statement and the PBS DOJ briefing describe about 1,000 federal election monitors who observe and report, not party poll watchers and not federal troops. The program is more than twice the size of the 2022 deployment, and secretaries of state from both parties have said they will watch how the monitors behave on Election Day.