Federal election monitors from the U.S. Department of Justice are fanning out across Multnomah County on Tuesday, watching voting centers, ballot drop boxes and ballot processing sites as part of a sweeping nationwide deployment. The county is the only location in Oregon chosen for the effort, while officials insist the visiting monitors have to play by the same rules as everybody else.
The DOJ confirmed it would send an unspecified number of monitors from its Civil Rights Division to Multnomah County on Nov. 3, according to OPB. The department has said its monitors “only observe and take notes” and are not supposed to interfere with how elections are run, per the same report. The Oregon Secretary of State's Office said federal officials notified it on Oct. 22 that the agency planned to send monitors to the county, according to KATU, which also confirmed Multnomah County is the only Oregon site getting the deployment.
As KGW reports, the DOJ announced in October that it would send roughly 1,000 monitors and observers to 124 jurisdictions across all 50 states, with about six to eight observers expected in each jurisdiction, and the department reaffirmed the plan heading into Tuesday. In Washington state, King County and Yakima County were the two locations chosen for the program, the KATU report notes.
Rules Observers Must Follow
Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said the federal visitors don't get special treatment. “They have to follow the same rules that everybody else does,” he told OPB. Scott has previously told KGW that having federal observers present is a new wrinkle, even though election observers in general are a routine part of the process.
Those rules are spelled out in writing. Per Multnomah County's observer procedures, anyone observing the receiving and counting of votes at the Elections Office must provide written authorization signed by a political party officer, a candidate, or the Director of Elections under ORS 254.482. Observers are escorted through the office and must sign the county's Observer Agreements and Rules of Conduct, and the procedures bar them from interacting with ballots or other election materials.
The Oregon Secretary of State's Office has its own guidelines limiting what observers, including federal monitors, can do. The office's rules prohibit observers from talking to election workers, interfering with conversations between workers and voters, taking photos or videos of sensitive voter information, or handling ballots or official election materials. The office said it would coordinate with county elections officials to ensure a free and fair vote-by-mail election, according to a press release. Scott has said he welcomes election observers and supports transparent, accessible, secure and reliable elections.
A Nationwide Push, With Wyoming Fallout Still Fresh
The scale of this year's operation stands out. The DOJ's planned deployment of around 1,000 monitors nationwide is about triple the number it sent out during the 2022 midterms, according to the Statesman Journal. OregonLive has described the effort as the DOJ's largest monitoring operation in history, spanning monitors and observers in all 50 states. The practice itself isn't new — the Department of Justice has sent attorneys and staff to polling places for more than 60 years to help ensure Americans can vote free of discrimination or intimidation, according to The Atlantic.
Still, the program has drawn scrutiny over how individual monitors have behaved in the field. Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read cited two DOJ monitors who showed “irregular” and “a bit aggressive” behavior while watching poll workers during Wyoming's primary election on Aug. 18, according to KOIN. Read said Oregon is ready regardless. “We are prepared. We will follow the law, and we will make sure the Department of Justice does the same,” he said, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle. The DOJ had not immediately answered questions about how many monitors would be sent to Multnomah County or why the county was selected, the Capital Chronicle reported.
Other states have handled the federal presence differently. DOJ observers sent to Minnesota during its August primary were joined by state officials, and a similar joint program was set up in California for the general election, per the Statesman Journal. The Atlantic's reporting found that nearly all of the monitors' visits during the primaries were professional, and that the department coordinated with local officials ahead of time. Separately, Democrats and nonprofit groups have organized an even larger voter-observation effort of their own for Election Day in response to the administration's plans, OregonLive reported.
Turnout context adds some stakes to the deployment. Oregon has roughly 3 million registered voters, and midterm elections in the state have historically drawn an average turnout of about 69%, according to Secretary of State data. As of Monday, Oregon voters had submitted a little more than half of their ballots, per a report in The Oregonian.
