DOJ Is Recruiting Prosecutors to Monitor Polling Places

The Justice Department is recruiting criminal prosecutors as part of its expanded election-monitoring effort for the November elections, breaking with a long-standing practice of using only civil attorneys and non-attorney staffers.

While there’s no firm rule against sending prosecutors out to monitor polling places, the DOJ has avoided using them in part over worries their presence could intimidate voters and poll workers, former department officials say.

Several DOJ prosecutors, as well as an FBI agent on a special prosecutorial assignment, have already served as monitors in at least one primary election, visiting polls in Arizona over the summer, according to records shared with The Washington Sun and interviews with local officials.

Justice Department leaders have since called on attorneys and staffers from across the department — including those in its criminal divisions — to work as monitors in November, according to internal emails reviewed by The Sun.

The move is part of a Justice Department effort, announced by Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who oversees the Civil Rights Division, to send an unprecedented 1,000 monitors to polls across the country on Election Day.

That plan has drawn scrutiny from election administrators, advocates and lawmakers over the department’s push to have monitors examine issues beyond the normal purview of the Civil Rights Division and its Voting Section, which manages the election monitoring program.

Historically, monitors have been deployed to specific election jurisdictions to conduct basic oversight such as checking for bilingual services and wheelchair accessibility at polling places. They may talk discreetly with election officials and interview voters on their way out of polling places, but they are strictly trained not to intervene in the voting process.

Dhillon has said monitors will look for cases of alleged fraud alongside traditional voting rights compliance, and DOJ communications during the primaries indicated that monitors were being deployed to help ensure “ballot security” and “ballot integrity” — matters normally overseen by the department’s criminal sections.

A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed the arrangement in a statement Monday, saying that “department attorneys, including prosecutors, will serve as election monitors, as Department personnel have in many past elections.”

Monitors will not identify themselves as prosecutors and must avoid interfering in the voting process, according to the spokesperson, who added that no FBI personnel are participating in the monitoring program.

“Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate,” the spokesperson said.

Several former Civil Rights Division officials said DOJ leaders may be recruiting prosecutors because they don’t have enough civil attorneys willing to participate after a barrage of firings and resignations under the Trump administration.

“It’s really possible that this is just about numbers and not some shift in the planned approach,” said one former senior official in the Civil Rights Division who spoke on the condition of anonymity over fear of retaliation. “It’s noteworthy, it’s important, and it’s concerning, but it doesn’t mean that the message to voters is that there’s going to be tons of criminal prosecutors out there monitoring the polls.”

Stacey Young, executive director of the DOJ alumni group Justice Connection and a former longtime attorney with the department, said the purpose of DOJ’s election monitoring was always to “ensure jurisdictions with a history of voting rights violations were following federal civil rights laws.”

“That’s why the election monitoring program was run by the department’s civil rights attorneys who were trained to only observe, and relied on civil attorneys and non-attorney staff, instead of prosecutors who can charge election officials and voters with crimes,” Young said.

“DOJ’s deployment of prosecutors as monitors,” she said, “carries the real risk that election interference and voter intimidation will follow.”

Civil attorneys from the nation’s 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices have served as monitors in previous elections. Paralegals, analysts and other support staffers who work directly with prosecutors have also participated in the program.

But a half-dozen former Voting Section officials interviewed by The Sun said they were unaware of any instance in which the department has sent prosecutors to the polls.

Criminal prosecutors “absolutely have not done election monitoring in the past,” said Anna Baldwin, who was a Civil Rights Division attorney focusing on voting issues from 2010 to 2025. “It’s not a criminal investigation.”

Another former Voting Section official said it was a matter of custom not to use prosecutors. “We never did that, because if you introduce yourself to a voter and say, ‘I’m a prosecutor,’ that’s just more intimidating,” the former official said. “Sending prosecutors out would have been less helpful because other people have more relevant experience.”

Over the summer, the presence of a handful of prosecutors monitoring polling places in Arizona didn’t appear to cause any problems.

At least seven criminal prosecutors worked as election monitors in Arizona during the state’s primary in July, alongside several civil attorneys and staffers, according to public records provided to The Sun by the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward.

The prosecutors appear to have all come from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, according to the documents. Some went out in Maricopa County, others in Pima County.

One of the prosecutors, Clay Rehrig, is an FBI agent working on a special detail that involves prosecuting violent crimes and hate crimes, according to his LinkedIn profile and news releases from the Justice Department.

Maricopa County’s deputy elections director for communications, Jennifer Liewer, said she was not aware that some of the monitors were prosecutors but emphasized that there was “nothing out of the ordinary” in the way they conducted themselves at polling places.

She said DOJ officials reached out beforehand to let her office know they intended to send monitors, and that once on site they asked for bilingual materials.“They went about it the way they normally do,” Liewer told The Sun. “Maricopa had a very typical experience.”

Things also went smoothly in Pima County, according to Elections Director Constance Hargrove. Monitors there asked poll workers about training and assisting Spanish-speaking voters, she said.

“The visit was no different from any other visits in past elections,” Hargrove said in an email.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Several civil attorneys DOJ dispatched as monitors during the primaries have raised alarms among election administrators and voting advocates because of their behavior at polling places or their ties to efforts challenging President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

Among them was Joseph Voiland, a new addition to the Civil Rights Division who helped monitor polls in Fairfax County, Virginia, according to public records shared by Democracy Forward. The records were first reported by CNN.

Before joining the department, Voiland served as a lawyer for the Trump campaign in a bid to overturn Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election results. At least two other civil attorneys who served as monitors previously worked on 2020 election challenges, according to the records.

Across the Civil Rights Division, as The Sun has previously reported, a majority of current attorneys have been hired since Trump took office last year.

Another recent hire to the division, David Levin, pleaded guilty to charges related to his illegal accessing of government election websites in 2016, records show. Levin served as a monitor in Maricopa County, according to the records.

Monitoring during the primaries mostly proceeded without incident, but tensions escalated in Wyoming after officials said monitors there crossed the line.

During the state’s primary in August, Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said two DOJ monitors asked to examine ballot tabulators and training guides, and wanted to know how new voting equipment was acquired.

Those questions “appeared to me to be outside the scope of federal voting rights laws,” Lee told The Sun in a statement in August. Wyoming’s Republican governor asked the state attorney general to look into the monitors’ actions.

According to public records shared by Democracy Forward, the monitors were John Casali and Jake Bachand, civil attorneys who joined the DOJ recently after working at Trump-aligned nonprofits.

“My advice to my fellow county clerks in Wyoming and to election administrators in other ‘red’ states is don’t think this won’t happen to you,” Lee said in her statement. “Know what the law allows monitors to do and what it does not, and what the monitors’ intentions are.”