The Justice Department Says It Will Send a Record ~1,000 Monitors to the Midterm Polls — and a Senator Asks the Pentagon to Put in Writing That It Will Not Send Troops or Seize Ballots
Two announcements eleven weeks before the November 2026 midterms put the question of federal presence at American polling places back in front of Congress. On Monday, August 17, 2026, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told Bloomberg Law that the department would deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors in November — "probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration." Dhillon said the monitors would observe rather than intervene, would be trained on the same materials used by previous administrations, and would watch for language-access and disability-access barriers as well as suspected fraud. The number is many times what the department has typically fielded, and it lands as President Trump repeatedly predicts Democrats will "cheat" to retake Congress and after his call for Republicans to "nationalize" elections. The next day, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official, wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine asking them to confirm in writing that the Defense Department "will not send Federal troops to the polls or to seize election materials of any kind." She pointed to Trump's 2020-era consideration of using the military to seize voting machines, his National Guard deployments to cities over Democratic governors' objections, and the 2025 deployment of active-duty Marines to Los Angeles. The Pentagon said it would respond through normal congressional correspondence channels; the Joint Chiefs did not comment. Hegseth, asked a version of the same question at an April 2026 hearing, called it a "gotcha hypothetical" but said he had never been ordered to do anything illegal and would not follow such an order. Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee had earlier blocked a Democratic amendment to strengthen the existing statutory bar on federal troops at polling places. Democrats had already gone to the department about the monitors: on August 3, 2026, Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine led a ten-senator letter pressing DOJ to confirm the program would stay within its statutory limits and would not target jurisdictions on partisan lines. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, whose state saw monitors during the summer primary, has filed public records requests seeking the factual basis for the deployments.
“We are taking strong, joint legal action to block Donald Trump's threats to deploy federal agents, including ICE and FBI agents, to polling places this November. Sending armed federal agents into American neighborhoods to intimidate voters is not only wrong – it's illegal and would mark a new and extremely dangerous escalation of this administration's disregard for the rule of law and repeated attempts to rig the midterms. … Federal law explicitly forbids voter intimidation and stationing armed federal agents at polling places. Our case is clear, and we're confident we'll defeat Trump in court yet again.”