Justice Department urges civil-rights lawyers to serve as election monitors

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, circulated a memo urging division attorneys and professional staff to register as election monitors for the upcoming November 3 vote. The call asks volunteers to either staff polling locations across the United States or work at a Washington call center on Election Day. The initiative aims to deploy about 1,000 monitors to oversee adherence to voting-access regulations and other civil-rights issues within the division’s jurisdiction, as well as to watch for signs of election fraud.

Deploying federal observers for primaries, midterms and presidential contests is a standard practice for the Justice Department. The email. Dhillon emphasized that the monitors’ role would be to ensure compliance with civil-rights statutes during the election.