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In the end, a scheduled visit by Donald Trump’s election monitors amounted to a non-event, according to Multnomah County’s elections director.
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s midterm election, the president announced he’d send a record number of representatives to observe voting in Democratic strongholds, which critics called an effort to cast doubt on the electoral process and support his unfounded claims of voter fraud.
At noon sharp on Election Day, as more than a half-million ballots were being counted, two lawyers from the office of the U.S. attorney for Oregon arrived at the Multnomah County Elections office on SE Morrison Street. Over a brief 25-minute visit, they looked at tabulation machines and toured the facility for an overview of operations.
It was, according to elections director Tim Scott, fairly banal.
“I showed them the same stuff I would show anybody,” Scott says. “It was very uninteresting.”
Scott added that the monitors did seem interested in security modifications made to ballot boxes since the 2024 general election.
Elections observers are nothing new, Scott says. They sometimes represent political parties or congressional offices. But long-serving Multnomah County elections employees say the DOJ hasn’t sent observers to the elections center since at least the late 1990s.
The Justice Department has traditionally played a role monitoring elections to ensure compliance with civil rights legislation like the Voting Rights Act. Under President Joe Biden, the department reportedly dispatched several hundred election monitors in the midterm election.
This year, about a week prior to the midterms, the Department of Justice announced it would send 1,000 election monitors to predominantly Democratic jurisdictions in all 50 states. A Reuters analysis found that around two-thirds of those jurisdictions voted for Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 election. Black and Latino voters make a majority in many of them.
Trump further directed state and county officials across the country regarding stricter preservation of voter-registration information, which in Oregon was met with a rebuke by state Secretary of State Tobias Read. Trump also unsuccessfully appealed to the Supreme Court at the last minute to prevent California from counting mail-in ballots from 20,000 voters who federal officials say are likely noncitizens.
And in Alaska, the DOJ also launched a criminal probe into allegations that Democratic senate candidate Mary Peltola helped recruit a third candidate to her race to capitalize on confusion over his name, Dan Sullivan—the same as her Republican opponent.
