Election monitors from the U.S. Department of Justice will be in Orleans, East Baton Rouge and Lafayette parishes on Election Day, and the feds have warned that election workers could face criminal charges if they do not preserve all voting records.
The efforts are part of a larger, monthslong push by President Donald Trump’s administration to crack down on voter fraud. Democrats have accused the Republican president of stoking unwarranted fears about unreliable elections and trying to intimidate officials to interfere with midterm elections, which will determine .
Specific DOJ employees are authorized to be election monitors inside polling locations in three parishes on Nov. 3, according to correspondence from the Louisiana Secretary of State’s Office to Jake Bachand, an attorney in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ.
“Monitors only observe and take notes regarding the election process. They do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process,” the letter says. They can assess compliance with federal laws regarding voting assistance, voter discrimination and intimidation, provisional ballots and accessibility for people with disabilities, the letter says.
Louisiana officials would not say how many monitors will be present in the state, and the number and names of the monitors were redacted in a copy of the letter that was provided to Ĵý | Times-Picayune.
“The Department of Justice has confirmed plans to monitor elections in all 50 states, including Louisiana,” Secretary of State spokesperson Trey Williams said in a statement. “The Department of Justice has monitored elections across the country for many years, including in Louisiana, so federal election monitoring is nothing new. Our responsibility is to conduct elections fairly, securely, and in accordance with the law. We support transparency and accountability and have nothing to hide. We expect federal officials to operate within the law, just as we do.”
Orleans Parish Clerk of Court Chelsey Napoleon, who oversees local election administration, said during an interview Monday with Times-Picayune columnist Will Sutton on WBOK that federal monitors would be “onsite at different polling locations, not specific ones, but they will be stopping by.”
“They won’t be communicating with voters or poll commissioners. They will just observe,” she said.
Groups like political parties and candidates register people to serve as poll watchers during every election cycle, Napoleon said. “Having an observer is not necessarily a new thing,” she said.
Two monitors from the DOJ will be in East Baton Rouge Parish, according to Brandon Abadie, administrator of elections for the Clerk of Court there.
Abadie, who has worked in elections since 2010, said he couldn’t recall a past election when DOJ monitors were present.
The Justice Department has been planning its largest-ever election monitoring effort, with about 1,000 department staff expected to observe voting across the country, DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels said recently.
Last month, a senior department official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the department, said DOJ was planning to send monitors to every state, focusing on high-population areas, jurisdictions that have had problems in the past and districts with close elections.
Criminal penalties threatened
The Justice Department also sent a letter last week to state election officials across the country, including in Louisiana, emphasizing that election workers could face criminal charges if they fail to preserve voting records.
An Oct. 29 letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter says that federal law requires state election officers to preserve voting records for 22 months after an election.
“These records include, for example, completed voter registration forms, pollbooks and precinct sign-in sheets, copies of identity documents, requests for a vote-by-mail ballot, envelopes containing a completed ballot, the ballot itself whether mailed, placed in a drop box, or submitted in person, any document that vouches for the eligibility and qualifications of another voter, and other related records produced by the act of registering to vote or voting,” the letter says.
The letter notes that failure to follow those rules, or stealing or destroying ballots, is a crime, punishable by up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Williams, the secretary of state spokesperson, said that Louisiana already complies with the requirements because they are federal law.
Other states bristled at the communication. A letter addressed to Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read misspelled his name.
“As secretaries of state across the country know, effective election administration requires professionalism, competency and attention to detail,” Read wrote in an Oct. 30 reply to McCotter. “It is in that spirit that I will point out to you that my name is spelled R-E-A-D, as in ‘read the Constitution.’”
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry, a Republican, has been supportive of the Trump administration’s efforts to scrutinize state voter rolls.
Landry has advocated for use of the revamped federal SAVE immigration database to check voters’ citizenship status. And she of several noncitizens who were recently charged with voting illegally in the 2024 election. She also to the Justice Department earlier this year, while dozens of other states have resisted requests for their voter lists.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has been battling in several court cases over ballot-counting. It sued California last month, seeking to delay the counting of ballots cast by people it says may not be U.S. citizens. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the administration’s request to set aside the ballots.
The Justice Department made a similar request in Washington last month for the state to sequester ballots submitted by hundreds of people it suspects are not U.S. citizens. And, another lawsuit filed in Alaska last month sought to delay certification of the vote if the Republican incumbent running for U.S. Senate doesn’t win. A federal judge in Alaska dismissed the lawsuit Sunday.
All three states have House or Senate races that will help determine the balance of power in Congress.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.