In a recent tussle over federal oversight, the Texas Secretary of State, Jane Nelson, has denied the U.S. Justice Department's election monitors access to Texas polling places on Election Day. The move comes after the Justice Department announced that it would send monitors to a collection of Texas counties, including Atascosa, Bexar, Dallas, Frio, Harris, Hays, Palo Pinto, and Waller counties, as part of its national efforts to observe potential voting rights issues, according to a report from the Texas Tribune.

Despite Texas' assurance of "robust processes and procedures in place to ensure that eligible voters may participate in a free and fair election," Nelson declared, in a late Friday correspondence, that the DOJ election monitors were not permitted under state law to be within the precincts or at central vote-tallying sites, Click2Houston reported. The Justice Department has traditionally dispatched election monitors around the nation, a mandate stemming from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which aimed to eradicate discriminatory voting practices, and foster equal voting access.

However, following a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that invalidated key parts of the Act, federal monitors must now procure permission or a court order to be present, a requirement that Texas, as well as Florida, Missouri in 2022, and Arkansas this year, have chosen not to oblige. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State's office told ABC News that state election inspectors would be spread out to "various locations" across Texas during the election, as per Click2Houston.

Texas Democrats, from local to federal ranks, previously petitioned the DOJ to send monitors to oversee Texas' most populous counties. Though the agency plans to attend only a portion of those requested locales. The selection of Massachusetts for a similar degree of scrutiny as Texas, receiving monitors in 86 jurisdictions, remains unexplained. It should be noted that while the Texas Secretary of State has supported The Texas Tribune financially, such affiliations bear no sway on the reported journalism, aligning with the outlet's commitment to unbiased reporting.