Justice Department to monitor state voting in possible 2026 preview
Election workers prepare mail-in ballots for tallying at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on the eve of Election Day on Nov. 4, 2024 in City of Industry, California. AFP-TNS
Despite the lack of evidence, President Donald Trump and his top aides continue to contend they need to keep fighting the alleged voter fraud he falsely blamed for his 2020 defeat.
As part of that, Trump has announced plans, mostly not yet implemented, to expand the federal role in state supervision of elections. Next week, the Justice Department is sending federal agents to monitor off-year state elections in California and New Jersey.
While the department called election monitoring a routine function, some Democrats fear it’s the first step in making fraud claims this year -- and next. “This is a preview of 2026,” warned California Gov. Gavin Newsom, referring to next year’s congressional elections. “Wake up, everybody.”And California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the state would dispatch its own observers to monitor the federal ones.Its goal, the Justice Department said, is “to ensure transparency, ballot security and compliance with federal law.”
While past administrations also sent federal monitors, there are no federal elections Tuesday, and the administration’s moves stem primarily from local GOP criticism of mail-in voting, a persistent target of criticism by Trump.
The New Jersey Republicans requested federal monitors to “oversee the receipt and processing of vote-by-mail ballots.” In California, where most voting is by mail, GOP Chairwoman Corrin Rankin wrote that, “In recent elections, we have received reports of irregularities in these (five) counties that we fear will undermine either the willingness of voters to participate in the election or their confidence in the announced results of the election.”
In fact, the main thing that has undermined confidence in recent American elections is Trump’s repeated false contention that the 2020 election was rigged against him — and his ability to convince many Republicans.
Going forward, Trump has made little secret of his intention, if not his means.“We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again,” Trump said recently. “We just can’t let that happen. I know (FBI Director) Kash (Patel) is working on it, everybody is working on it. And certainly (National Intelligence Director) Tulsi (Gabbard) is working on it. We can’t let that happen again to our country.”
He has installed several 2020 election deniers in government roles that deal with election security, including Heather Honey, named in August as deputy secretary of homeland security for election integrity.
According to The New York Times, Honey suggested to conservative activists before her appointment that the administration should declare a “national emergency” to justify dictating new election rules to the states, just as Trump used similar declarations to increase tariffs, expand immigration crackdowns and expand energy production.
Meanwhile, Newsom and Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker – both potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates — said they feared Trump’s recent dispatch of National Guard troops to cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland to curb crime and assist the roundup of illegal immigrants is a forerunner of what he might do next year.
“I think it’s not very far away from him offering and providing the military to protect the polling places across America, but particularly in blue states and blue cities, with the idea that they could confiscate the ballot boxes if they think there is fraud in the election,” Pritzker said in an interview with Politico.
Newsom questioned the motives behind the Justice Department’s decision to monitor voting in five southern and central California counties, and in Passaic County, N.J. California is holding a referendum next Tuesday on Newsom’s effort to redistrict congressional seats, while New Jersey is electing a new governor.
“They are creating the pretext that after we’re successful with Prop. 50, after there is a Democratic governor in New Jersey — and will be one in Virginia, unquestionably — that they can suggest somehow these were fraudulent, these elections were rigged against them,” Newsom told KQED in San Francisco.
Pritzker also cited the Justice Department’s demand for detailed state voter information.
“That’s never happened in the history of the United States,” he said. “They won’t tell us what they’re doing with them, but it appears that they want to use them in the elections next year, claiming fraud. So, when you put all these things together, it’s not a leap to say that he’s doing this because he wants to affect the 2026 elections in favor of MAGA.”
One goal, The New York Times reported, is to prove previously unsubstantiated claims that large numbers of illegal immigrants have voted illegally. But many states refused to provide the requested data, and the department has sued eight states, including California.And when Texas sought to determine the extent of illegal voting, its initial results seem to confirm prior conclusions that the numbers are small.
A comparison of the state’s voter registration list with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s database identified only 2,724 noncitizens who were registered to vote, Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced.Since Texas has 18.6 million registered voters, that means non-citizen registrants constitute about .01 of one percent.
The executive order Trump signed in March mandated proof of citizenship for voter registration, banned counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day. even if postmarked by then and gave the federal government a new role in state purging of its registration rolls.
Multiple legal challenges have been filed, and the federal courts have blocked enforcement of the citizenship requirement.But the warnings from Newsom and Pritzker make clear that Democrats will be closely watching next week’s Justice Department monitors for further clues to the administration’s long-term intentions.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. This article was published by The Dallas Morning News and distributed by Tribune Content Agency.