Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General who runs the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said on 22 September that the department would send about 1,000 election monitors in November1. She named Nevada, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as destinations. Dhillon called it "the biggest DOJ election observer effort in history" and said the division had brought 67 election-related indictments and convictions this cycle, against 13 under the Biden administration. She also described a new protocol: when monitors flag signs of fraud, she will ring the relevant US Attorney, the federal prosecutor for that district, herself. Nevada's place on the list follows the department's letter telling its secretary of state, Francisco Aguilar, that he is personally under investigation.
The department's courtroom record ran the other way the next day. Judge Kymberly Evanson of the federal district court in Seattle dismissed its suit for Washington's full voter rolls on 23 September2. She found its reading of the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 unpersuasive. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown counts that as the department's 25th consecutive loss in these voter-file cases. Lowdown's own count of dismissals stood at 17 in July, when the programme was reaching the appeals courts.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 15 September. He told Senator Richard Blumenthal that he did not know of a legal bar to agents at polling places, and declined to commit to keeping them away3. For voters in the three named states, November brings federal monitors whose reports can reach a prosecutor through Dhillon's office.
