FILE — Ballots move through a signature verification system at the Multnomah County Elections Division office in Portland, Ore. The Trump administration is sending election monitors to the county on Nov. 3, Election Day.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB
The Trump administration is sending monitors to watch vote counting in Oregon’s most liberal county on Election Day.
In an email Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice told state elections officials it will send an unspecified number of election monitors from its Civil Rights Division to Multnomah County on Nov. 3 as staff accept and process ballots.
“Our monitors only observe and take notes,” Anelise Powers, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney with the Civil Rights Division, wrote to Secretary of State Tobias Read. “They do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process.”
With the announcement, Oregon’s most populous county joins a growing list of localities nationwide where the Trump administration is sending election monitors.
The DOJ told Bloomberg earlier this year it would deploy up to 1,000 such monitors nationwide — even as the administration bucks decades of precedent by not allowing international election observers to scrutinize the midterms.
NPR reported earlier this week that counties in Washington state, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota and Texas have been notified that DOJ monitors will be on hand.
News of the monitors has drawn alarm in some corners, given Trump’s repeated attempts to assert new authority over elections, and his frequent, unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud. Federal monitors deployed to observe the primary election in Wyoming’s most-populous county earlier this year were accused of behaving aggressively, including attempting to interview voters.
But Oregon election officials on Friday took news of the monitoring in stride, saying DOJ officials would be granted no greater access than any member of the public who wants to observe ballot tallying.
“They’re just observers,” Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott told OPB. “They have to follow the same rules that everybody else does.”
Read and U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, both Democrats, were among those amplifying that message.
“Let’s be clear: it is not legal for these observers or anyone else to interfere with Oregon’s elections – even the Department of Justice,” Read said in a statement. “We are prepared. We will follow the law, and we will make sure the Department of Justice does the same.”
Rules in Multnomah County bar any observers from talking to election workers, interfering when election staff are talking to voters, taking photos or videos of sensitive information, and handling any ballots.
The DOJ’s Thursday email said its monitors will dress in business casual clothes, with no pins identifying them as affiliated with the DOJ. It said monitors would be looking for compliance with a broad range of federal elections statutes.
“If our monitors observe an election issue, they will notify their team lead for the jurisdiction,” the email said.
It was not immediately clear Friday why the DOJ singled out Multnomah County.
The DOJ told NPR that it prioritizes counties with competitive races when deciding where to send monitors. Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, the state’s most competitive, does include portions of Multnomah County. U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum, the Democratic incumbent, is favored to win reelection to the district in a year where Democrats appear to have national momentum.
King County, Washington, home to Seattle, has also received word that election monitors will be on hand for Election Day.
The Trump administration has clashed repeatedly with Oregon on election matters. The state successfully fought demands that it turn over sensitive voter data to the administration, prevailing in federal court. Oregon also participated in lawsuits challenging an executive order from Trump that sought to upend mail-in voting. The Supreme Court ultimately barred the rule from impacting this year’s election.
In a separate lawsuit, the state settled with conservative plaintiffs who accused election officials of being lax in kicking ineligible voters off of its rolls. The Trump administration intervened in part of that lawsuit, but was not a party to the settlement.
