Oct. 29 · Elections
Donald Trump’s Former Campaign Lawyer Is Running the Justice Department’s Election Day Operation at the Polls
For the first time since 2002, the administration rejected international observers for an American election.
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Losers’ consent. That’s what political scientists call it when the side that loses an election accepts the count, and an American election works only as long as the losing side does. In 2002 the United States government began inviting international observers to watch every round of American federal elections and publish what they saw, which meant a voter on the losing side could read what trained outsiders recorded. Who will check the count on Nov. 3, 2026, and what reason will the side that loses have to believe it? To answer that, I started with what the United States promised in 1990, then went through each check on the count that changed in 2026, from the international observers to the federal civil rights lawyers and the former Trump campaign lawyer who now leads them, the voter rolls, the federal election security agency and the courts. Then I looked at Texas, where the state’s official count of registered voters in a battleground county is wrong by 144,124, by the county’s own account, and ended with what political scientists have learned about the side that loses.
In the 1990 Copenhagen Document, the United States and the other members of what is now the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe agreed that “the presence of observers, both foreign and domestic, can enhance the electoral process” and committed to inviting one another’s observers. The United States government kept that commitment from 2002 through 2024, when the organization’s observers watched all 12 rounds of American federal elections, six midterms among them. They called the 2024 election “well-run.”
The United States government invited the observers in 2012 too, when then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, now the governor, warned them that they could face criminal prosecution for standing within 100 feet of a polling place entrance. In 2024 the United States government criticized Russia for refusing to cooperate with the organization, saying that the United States had invited the organization’s observers for decades “to assess our own elections” and had encouraged the other member countries to do the same.
In 2026 the administration declined to invite the observers, the first time since the organization began watching American elections.
The organization called the decision “regrettable” and “not in line with” American commitments, and Pere Joan Pons, president of their parliamentary assembly, said the decision “represents a significant departure from an established democratic practice.”
The Justice Department plans to send a record 1,000 monitors to polling places on Nov. 3, 2026, up from 289 in the 2022 midterm and 714 in 2024, with the aim of reaching all 50 states. In Georgia, the department’s monitors are headed to six counties that voted for the Democrat in each of the last three presidential elections:
Chatham
Bibb
Cobb
DeKalb
Fulton
Gwinnett
The department’s monitors answer to the administration whose party is on the ballot.
Administrations of both parties have sent federal monitors to polling places to enforce the Voting Rights Act’s bans on discrimination and intimidation. In 2026 the monitors are being sent by the department’s Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. Her law firm represented Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign, and in 2020, as a legal adviser to his campaign, she posted “STOP THE STEAL!” A department lawyer who previously worked as senior counsel at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that lobbies to reduce immigration, signed the letter notifying Chatham County of the monitoring. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, expressed concern about the “aggressive” conduct of some Justice Department monitors during the 2026 primaries. Under a briefing memo for local election officials, the monitors generally may enter a polling place only with state and local consent.
NPR reported in October 2026 that about 300 attorneys have left the Civil Rights Division since the president returned to office in January 2025 and about 130 have been hired, and that in dozens of cases, voting rights cases among them, the division has dropped investigations or withdrawn statements of interest, the filings in which the department tells a court the United States government’s position.
For about two decades, since a political hiring scandal in the George W. Bush administration, career attorneys had led the division’s hiring. Current and former officials told NPR that under Dhillon, the division’s front office, which is made up of political appointees, has removed career staff from the process and taken the lead in hiring. The department told NPR that “career staff hire career staff, just as in prior administrations.”
Since May 2025, the division’s Voting Section has been collecting the country’s voter rolls. The department has asked at least 48 states and the District of Columbia for their complete lists, and at least 16 states handed over full files with driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The department sued 30 states and the District of Columbia, and courts have dismissed 27 of those 31 suits. On Oct. 9, 2026, a federal judge ruled against the department, writing that the policy “represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote.”
The acting chief of the Voting Section said at a hearing in March 2026 that the rolls would be checked against a Homeland Security database, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE. The Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization at New York University School of Law, reports that the Justice Department has been giving voter records to Homeland Security, which is using them to attempt immigration enforcement, according to internal correspondence from summer 2026.
Immigration officials built SAVE so that benefit agencies could check whether an immigrant qualifies for a program. Under a presidential executive order, Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration modified it to include the records of U.S.-born citizens and to give it access to Social Security numbers. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the modified system in June 2026, finding that the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens” and that states were “actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.” On Sept. 25, 2026, the Supreme Court let the government use it in an unsigned order, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that “burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm.”
By May 2026, states had checked at least 67 million registrations against SAVE, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services counted about 24,000 potential noncitizens in 60 million of those checks, 0.04 percent.
The Brennan Center reported in April 2025 that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the main federal agency that coordinates cybersecurity protections with states and localities, elections included, conducted nearly 1,300 physical security assessments for election officials and others ahead of the 2024 election, and many local election officials used them to improve their physical security. In early 2025 the Department of Government Efficiency cut about 130 workers from the agency, election security advisers among them, and in March 2025 the agency ended funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, where election offices shared threat information.
In February 2026 the president said on a podcast that “the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” and should “take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.” Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, called that same month for immigration agents to “surround the polls.” In September 2026, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Immigration and Customs Enforcement “isn’t there to patrol the polling places” and added, “If we’re serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be.”
Four lawsuits over immigration agents at the polls have been filed, one of them citing a federal law that makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, for a federal official to bring “troops or armed men” to any place where an election is held.
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Voters who believe a district map dilutes their votes because of race can sue under the Voting Rights Act, and in April 2026 the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais 6 to 3. The Brennan Center reads the decision as requiring those plaintiffs to bring strong evidence of “present-day intentional racial discrimination,” with older discrimination “entitled to much less weight.”
In June 2026 the Court ruled 5 to 4 in Watson v. Republican National Committee that states may count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing that “the electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received.”
Texas was one of at least 16 states that gave the Justice Department a full voter roll, handing over about 18.4 million records with driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers on Dec. 23, 2025, under an agreement the state has kept private. Earlier, in fall 2025, Texas had checked the state’s registered voters against SAVE and sent counties information on 2,724 potential noncitizens, and counties canceled the registration of each of those voters who did not answer a notice within 30 days.
Election officials later found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the Department of Public Safety, where some had shown proof of citizenship, and on July 29, 2026, the state told counties to “immediately reinstate some voters who were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens.”
In August 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit restored Texas’s identification rule for mail ballots, and a Brennan Center study of the March 2022 primary, the first statewide election under the rule, found that one in seven Texans who started the process of voting by mail had the application or the ballot rejected, and that about 90 percent of those voters did not vote in that primary.
Tarrant County is a battleground county in the 2026 midterm, when Texas voters choose between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate. The Republican majority on the county’s commissioners court voted 3 to 2 to cut Election Day polling places to 224, down from 316 in the 2022 midterm, and Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr., a Democrat who voted no, said his precinct lost three early voting sites because “those areas are poor.” “We’re punishing those people for being poor,” Miles said. Enrico Cantoni, in a study of elections in Massachusetts and Minnesota published in the American Economic Journal in 2020, found that moving a voter’s polling place about a quarter mile farther away cuts ballots cast by 2 to 5 percent.
The Texas Secretary of State’s office published a November count of 1,228,367 registered voters in Tarrant, 78,060 fewer than in March 2026, while all 24 other Texas counties with more than 150,000 registered voters grew. Tarrant County’s own count, posted on the county’s voter registration dashboard, is 144,124 higher, and the county told the Texas Tribune the gap comes from “a syncing issue” between the county’s system and the state’s new registration system. County officials said the inconsistencies “do not affect the ability of eligible voters to cast their ballot,” and Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State, said the office is “looking into this matter.”
Texas officials also cleared a backlog of about 500,000 voter applications that went unprocessed because of “a software error in the Texas Department of Public Safety web portal,” and on Oct. 14, 2026, five days before early voting began, they said the backlog “has since been resolved.”
In Tarrant County, the two offices that keep the voter roll are the two offices that disagree.
Voters are turning out anyway. The University of Florida Election Lab counted more than 39 million Americans who had voted early by the afternoon of Oct. 28, 2026, and Michael McDonald, the political scientist who directs the lab, counted 1.75 million more early votes in Texas than at the same point in 2022.
Every one of those voters belongs to a side that will win or lose, and Adam Przeworski, a political scientist and professor emeritus at New York University, wrote in his 1991 book Democracy and the Market that “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” That system lasts only as long as the losers accept the results. The five political scientists who wrote Losers’ Consent in 2005 found that losers support the political system less than winners on every measure they tested, and argued that losing has stronger negative effects in new democracies than in mature ones, because losers in new democracies “have not yet learned to lose.”
In a CNN poll taken in July 2023, two and a half years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, 69 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said Joe Biden’s 2020 win was not legitimate.
The Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago polled registered voters Oct. 8 to 12, 2026, and 55 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans said they had a great deal or quite a bit of confidence that the votes would be counted accurately. Democratic voters’ confidence has fallen from 75 percent in October 2022.
Seven in 10 Americans told pollsters for ABC News and The Washington Post that they are not confident the president would accept the result if his party loses, while 63 percent of Republicans said they were confident he would. In the Marist Poll taken Oct. 19 and 20, 2026, 70 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats said that if the candidate they support loses, that candidate should accept the results.
Through 2024, an American on the losing side of a federal election could read what international observers had seen at the polls, and career attorneys led the hiring of the federal lawyers who enforced voting rights. In 2026 the administration left the international observers uninvited, and current and former officials say political appointees have taken over that hiring while about 300 attorneys have left the Civil Rights Division. At least 16 states’ full voter rolls are with the Justice Department, and the 1,000 federal monitors work for an administration whose president rejected the 2020 count and whose civil rights chief posted “STOP THE STEAL!” Just over half of Democratic voters and fewer than four in 10 Republican voters now have a great deal or quite a bit of confidence in the count, and seven in 10 Americans doubt the president would accept a loss.
If Democrats lose on Nov. 3, 2026, the federal government’s account of what happened at the polls will come from monitors sent by the administration they ran against, including to six Georgia counties that voted Democratic in each of the last three presidential elections. If Republicans lose, the president will hold reports from 1,000 monitors sent by his Justice Department, and after he rejected the 2020 count, 69 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rejected it too.
On Nov. 3, 2026, a voter told at the polls that their name is missing from the roll can ask for a provisional ballot and call the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition’s hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE, which is 866-687-8683.
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