Voters cast their ballots in the general election on Nov. 5, 2024, at Cathedral of the Rockies in Boise. The Trump administration is sending election monitors to Idaho’s largest county on Election Day next week, the state’s top election official confirmed Wednesday. The decision comes as the Justice Department plans to deploy 1,000 election monitors – who the DOJ says are meant to assess local compliance with federal voting rights laws – to all 50 states. That would make for a significantly expanded presence than under the Biden administration, which sent election monitors to 24 states for the 2022 midterm elections, States Newsroom reported. Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, an elected Republican, said the U.S. Justice Department notified him and the Ada County Clerk’s Office, which runs the election locally, that there will be two teams in Ada County on Election Day. Ada County Clerk Trent Tripple, also a Republican, said around six election monitors who are local to Idaho will be stationed near polling places – but not inside. In a statement, the Justice Department said its election monitors in Idaho and elsewhere will be “doing the routine election monitoring the department has done for decades.” “All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process. 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,” a spokesperson for the federal agency told the Idaho Capital Sun.
Idaho’s top election official called deployment ‘routine’ The federal election monitors in Idaho, McGrane said, will be ensuring that voters have access to voting and assisting the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, such as by ensuring polling places are abiding by disability access requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. McGrane called it a routine measure. He said he last remembered election monitors sent to Idaho under the Obama administration. “I’m fairly sure we’ve had it under all (presidential) administrations in some form. I can most clearly remember ADA conversations when Obama was president. But it has been routine in the past,” McGrane said in an interview. The Trump administration’s decision to expand election monitors in states for the midterm elections, when control of Congress is at stake, follows recent attempts by the administration to intervene in state election processes, such as to restrict mail-in voting and obtain state voter rolls. That history has left some officials across the country concerned about the expanded election monitoring efforts. But McGrane said he isn’t worried. “I’ve seen the concerns among my peers and others nationally,” he said. “Initially, I wanted to understand and make sure what their mission was. After talking to … the new U.S. Attorney John Shirts … I feel reassured that this is something fairly routine. This is something that we’ve experienced before. And I don’t expect that voters will really even notice that it’s happening.” Tripple said he isn’t worried either. “They’ve done this before. It’s happened during multiple different administrations over the last couple of decades,” he said. “ Obviously, with the temperature around elections and a little bit of friction between states and the (Justice Department), I’m sure some will probably try to make hay out of this in terms of you know political wins on one side or the other. But it doesn’t bother us at all. … This will be a good opportunity for them to kind of see how elections should be run.” McGrane said the election monit
