Federal government is again sending election monitors to New Hampshire next week

The U.S. Department of Justice will again be visiting polls in Manchester and Nashua during next week’s elections, the department told election officials.

Election monitoring is a longstanding practice that has attracted new partisan suspicion amid President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about elections and his attempts to insert the federal government into what has always been a state and local affair.

In emails to Deputy Secretary of State Brendan O’Donnell, Manchester City Clerk Mathew Normand and Nashua City Clerk Daniel Healey, the federal government said monitors will be at polling locations to verify that cities are abiding by the Voting Rights Act, the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act, the Help America Vote Act and other federal election laws.

“The monitoring by the Civil Rights Division is done in the same way as in the past,” James Thomas Tucker, a trial attorney with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, wrote in the email. “Our monitors only observe and take notes. They do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process. Monitors will introduce themselves to the poll manager and present government ID (and a letter from the jurisdiction permitting entrance to the polls with the monitors’ names, if the jurisdiction wants each monitor identified).”

Tucker said monitors will wear “business casual clothing. No uniforms or pins identifying as DOJ are allowed.” They’ll “follow all rules of the state and jurisdiction,” are forbidden from carrying firearms and will not speak to voters, he said. And if they observe an issue, they’ll notify their team lead who may contact election officials.

Election monitors were also present during September’s primary elections in Manchester and Nashua. At the time, local election officials including Secretary of State David Scanlan said they were unconcerned and that election monitoring is standard.

Meanwhile, the DOJ sent a letter to Scanlan and other election officials across the country over the summer threatening him with “criminal liability” if he knowingly allows noncitizens to vote — something he has denied doing in interviews with the Bulletin. The Trump administration and Scanlan were also engaged in a monthslong legal battle until July over Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to force Scanlan to turn over confidential voter files.

In Tuesday’s election, the Trump administration is planning to send over 1,000 monitors across all 50 states in what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is calling “the biggest DOJ election observer effort in history.”

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“They’re not going to be interfering in any way,” Dhillon said on cable network Real America’s Voice, “or running the election. They’re gonna be observing.”

However, election officials across the country are concerned about what the Trump administration may do and preparing for interference given the president’s recent actions.

Just last week, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit, seeking to preemptively block officials from certifying Alaska’s U.S. Senate results if the Republican doesn’t win over concerns that another candidates’ similar name will confuse voters.

Earlier this year, Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize” elections in some liberal-leaning states, ostensibly because those states allegedly allow undocumented immigrants to vote. Doing so would run counter to the U.S. Constitution, which specifies that states determine the “times, places, and manner” of elections in a purposefully decentralized system.

Additionally, in January, the FBI seized boxes of 2020 ballots from a Fulton County, Georgia, election center — a jurisdiction that’s at the heart of his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

On Tuesday, Democrats hope to take advantage of Trump’s low approval rating and the fact that the party in power typically does poorly in midterms to make big gains in the battle for Congress.