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US Justice Department to Monitor Midterms, Avoid Appearance of Partisanship

Carrying on a long-established tradition, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) plans to deploy teams of federal observers around the country on Election Day next month while requiring the FBI to receive high-level approval for politically sensitive investigations that might call into question the integrity of the election.

At stake in the Nov. 8 congressional races is not only control of Congress but also the legitimacy of U.S. elections — fallout from former President Donald Trump’s attempt to undo the outcome of the 2020 presidential vote.

Many Americans are questioning the credibility of elections. At the same time, new laws passed by Republican state legislators have thrown up barriers to voting, rights advocates say, prompting the Justice Department to challenge the new measures in court.

The Justice Department, which under the Biden administration has made voting rights a central plank of its law enforcement agenda, says federal monitors will observe the midterm elections in an effort “to ensure that all qualified voters have the opportunity to cast their ballots and have their votes counted free of discrimination, intimidation and suppression.”

“The Civil Rights Division undertakes its important work to protect the right to vote all throughout each year, and this year’s work continues longstanding department tradition,” the Justice Department said in a statement Tuesday.

The U.S. has a decentralized election system, with voting administered at the county level.

But the federal government has a role too. The Justice Department’s civil rights division is responsible for enforcing a string of federal laws designed to protect the right to vote. These include the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

Federal election monitors, drawn from the Justice Department’s civil rights division as well as U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, will observe compliance with these laws, according to the Justice Department.

In the past two election cycles, the Justice Department dispatched election monitors to about 20 states. It is likely to cover the same number of states this year, according to Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the watchdog group Common Cause.

“I’ve been given no indication that they are going to stray greatly from prior behavior, and they told us that they are continuing to do their job as they’ve always done,” Albert said.

The locations to be monitored are determined based on whether “they have a history of problems and voters or community groups in the area making them [the DOJ] aware,” Albert said.

“You always use the institutional knowledge, the history of the location, any complaints from voters and voter advocates to monitor,” Albert said.

The Justice Department releases its election-monitoring plan on the eve of the midterms. A representative did not have any additional details about the department’s monitoring plan beyond the press statement.

Zack Smith, a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said the Justice Department observers play an important role in ensuring equal access to voting.

“Their goal is to really be kind of a quick reaction force if issues come up to us to potentially address those issues in real time,” Smith said.

In addition to the Justice Department monitors, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which the U.S. is a participating state, will deploy observers throughout the country to “closely monitor all aspects of the elections, including pre- and postelection developments.”

“The mission will assess the elections for their compliance with OSCE commitments and other international obligations and standards for democratic elections, as well as with national legislation,” the OSCE said in a statement Sept. 29.

Staying above politics

While taking steps to protect the right to vote, the Justice Department is keeping up another of its long-standing traditions: avoiding the appearance of partisanship during an election year.

In a May 25 staff email entitled “Election Year Sensitives,” Attorney General Merrick Garland urged Justice Department employees to be “particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and non-partisanship.”

“Simply put, partisan politics must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigation or criminal charges,” Gartland wrote.

The exhortation was a mere restatement of long-standing DOJ policies. But to the outrage of many on the left, Garland went on to say that he was keeping in place a 2020 directive issued by his predecessor, William Barr.

The Barr directive says the FBI must get the attorney general’s written approval before opening criminal or counterintelligence investigations of “politically sensitive individuals or entities.”

Garland’s decision to extend that policy gave fodder to critics who say he hasn’t moved aggressively enough to charge Trump and his associates for their alleged roles in the events leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

But the attorney general has said that “no person is above the law” and that the Justice Department “will follow the facts and the law, wherever they lead.”

Garland is a former federal judge and Supreme Court nominee. Defenders say he has restored the Justice Department’s traditional role as an independent law enforcement agency after four years of the Trump administration, during which the attorney general was accused of doing the president’s bidding.

But Republicans say that it is under Biden that the Justice Department has become politicized. They point to the FBI’s unprecedented investigation of Trump’s handling of presidential records as well as Justice Department lawsuits filed against “election integrity” laws enacted by Republican state lawmakers.

“I think there certainly is the perception, if not the reality that there’s a disconnect between what Merrick Garland is saying and what the department is actually doing,” Smith said.  
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Bullet-Proof Glass, Guards: US Election Offices Tighten Security for Nov. 8 Midterms

When voters in Jefferson County, Colorado, cast their ballots in the Nov. 8 midterm election, they will see security guards stationed outside the busiest polling centers.

At an election office in Flagstaff, Arizona, voters will encounter bulletproof glass and need to press a buzzer to enter.

In Tallahassee, Florida, election workers will count ballots in a building that has been newly toughened with walls made of the super-strong fiber Kevlar.

Spurred by a deluge of threats and intimidating behavior by conspiracy theorists and others upset over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, some election officials across the United States are fortifying their operations as they ramp up for another divisive election.

A Reuters survey of 30 election offices found that 15 have enhanced security in various ways, from installing panic buttons to hiring extra security guards to holding active-shooter and de-escalation training.

Reuters focused on offices in battleground states and offices that had openly expressed a need for security improvements, for example in congressional testimony. While the survey does not speak to how widespread such moves are, it does show how election officials are responding to threats in parts of the country where the election will likely be decided.

Election officials around the country said they were coordinating more closely with local law enforcement to respond quickly to disturbances. Many have also trained workers in de-escalating conflicts and evading active shooters.

Until recently, such threats to safety were seen as hypothetical in a country that has seen few instances of election-related violence since the civil rights battles of the 1960s, when the presence of armed officers sometimes intimidated rather than reassured Black voters.

Now those risks are seen as real, said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan public-interest group founded by entrepreneur and Democratic donor Pierre Omidyar.

“The likelihood that they could occur has definitely increased, so everyone is taking that to heart,” she said.

Election officials in 12 states, including some who have paid for moderate security improvements, said they have not received enough money to make their desired upgrades due to bureaucratic hurdles.

In Champaign County, Illinois, clerk Aaron Ammons would like to install metal detectors at his office, where visitors have filmed staff and the layout of the space in what he described as a threatening manner.

“It makes us feel like we’re targets, or we’re not a priority in the same way our men and women in uniform are. And we’re on the front lines of democracy just like they are,” said Ammons.

Ammons gave testimony to Congress in August that he and his wife received anonymous messages threatening their daughter’s life ahead of the 2020 election, and he told Reuters he recently saw someone filming his house.

The Justice Department says it has investigated more than 1,000 messages to election workers since the 2020 election, including more than 100 that could warrant prosecution. Reuters documented the campaign of fear being waged against election workers in a series of investigative reports.

Seven cases have been charged so far. The first sentence came Thursday, when a Nebraska man received 18 months in prison for threatening an election official.

Spooked workers

One in five U.S. election officials said that they were unlikely to stay in their job through 2024, when Americans will go to the polls again to elect a president, according to a survey by the Brennan Center for Justice that was released in March. They cited stress, attacks by politicians and impending retirement as reasons.

The lingering bitterness from the 2020 election has also spooked many of the temporary workers who check in voters, count ballots and perform other tasks that make elections possible, officials say.

Philadelphia has boosted pay for election day workers from $120 to $250 to help recruiting efforts that have been complicated by fears of harassment, as well as a tight labor market, said Omar Sabir, one of the city’s three election commissioners. After receiving death threats in 2020, he himself changed his travel patterns.

“You’ve got to keep your head on a swivel,” Sabir said.

“Sometimes I have nightmares thinking about that, somebody walking up and causing me harm.”

Protective measures

Many election officials blame disinformation, such as Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud in the 2020 election, for the surge in threats.

Justin Roebuck, the Republican clerk of Michigan’s rural, conservative Ottawa County, said Trump’s rhetoric had “really poisoned the well,” inspiring other candidates to sow doubts about elections. In Michigan, Republican candidates for governor, attorney general and other positions have questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.

Roebuck’s office held a three-hour role-playing exercise with local emergency management officials this year to plan how to respond to violent incidents. They also printed a brochure explaining balloting procedures that workers can hand to people to de-escalate confrontations with anyone aggressively questioning their work.

In addition to adding Kevlar walls, the Leon County, Florida, elections office has held active shooter training for its workers, installed bullet- and bomb-resistant glass, and invested in security cameras and video file storage, according to elections supervisor Mark Earley, who says he gets frequent hostile and profane calls from strangers.

“I’ve got to worry about my workers leaving the building and walking up to their cars after dark,” he said.

Earley paid to stiffen his facility’s security with a 2020 grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a non-profit group funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But Florida and 25 other states have since banned such outside funding.

Funding Woes

Election officials say they have struggled to get federal aid for safety measures.

The departments of Justice and Homeland Security said this year that funds would be available for election office security, but that money was claimed by local police departments and others more familiar with those programs, said Amy Cohen, the head of the National Association of State Election Directors.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said the agency’s Election Threats Task Force had worked since its launch in 2021 to steer federal aid to local election offices for security enhancements and had urged Congress to provide more such funding.

Some offices have paid for security enhancements by cutting back elsewhere. Jefferson County, Colorado, has scaled back mailings to voters to pay for four security guards who will monitor the busiest four voting locations in the weeks surrounding the election.

“It’s worth it for us, having the ability to be proactive rather than reactive,” said George Stern, the Jefferson County clerk.
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Proud Boys Member Pleads Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy in Capitol Riot 

A North Carolina man pleaded guilty Thursday of plotting with other members of the far-right Proud Boys to violently stop the transfer of presidential power after the 2020 election, making him the first member of the extremist group to plead guilty to a seditious conspiracy charge. 

Jeremy Joseph Bertino, 43, has agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department’s investigation of the role that Proud Boys leaders played in the mob’s attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a federal prosecutor said. 

Bertino’s cooperation could increase the pressure on other Proud Boys charged in the siege, including former national chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio. 

The guilty plea comes as the founder of another extremist group, the Oath Keepers, and four associates charged separately in the January 6 attack stand trial on a seditious conspiracy charge — a rarely used Civil War era offense that calls for up to 20 years behind bars. 

Bertino traveled to Washington with other Proud Boys in December 2020 and was stabbed during a fight, according to court documents. He was not in Washington for the January 6 riot because he was still recovering from his injuries, court papers say. 

Bertino participated in planning sessions in the days leading up to January 6 and received encrypted messages as early as January 4 indicating that Proud Boys were discussing possibly storming the Capitol, according to authorities. 

A statement of offense filed in court says that Bertino understood the Proud Boys’ goal in traveling to Washington was to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory and that the group was prepared to use force and violence if necessary to do so. 

Bertino also pleaded guilty to a charge of unlawfully possessing firearms in March 2022 in Belmont, North Carolina. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly agreed to release Bertino pending a sentencing hearing, which wasn’t immediately scheduled. 

Justice Department prosecutor Erik Kenerson said sentencing guidelines for Bertino’s case recommend a prison sentence ranging from four years and three months to five years and three months. 

A trial is scheduled to start in December for Tarrio and four other members charged with seditious conspiracy: Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola. The charging document for Bertino’s case names those five defendants and a sixth Proud Boys member as his co-conspirators. 

The indictment in Tarrio’s case alleges that the Proud Boys held meetings and communicated over encrypted messages to plan for the attack in the days leading up to January 6. On the day of the riot, authorities say, Proud Boys dismantled metal barricades set up to protect the Capitol and mobilized, directed and led members of the crowd into the building. 

Video testimony by Bertino was featured in June at the first hearing by the House committee investigating January 6. The committee showed Bertino saying that the group’s membership “tripled, probably” after Trump’s comment at a presidential debate that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” 

Tarrio wasn’t in Washington on January 6, but authorities say he helped put into motion the violence that day. Police arrested Tarrio in Washington two days before the riot and charged him with vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December 2020. Tarrio was released from jail on January 14 of this year after serving his five-month sentence for that case. 

More than three dozen people charged in the Capitol riot have been identified by federal authorities as leaders, members or associates of the Proud Boys. Two — Matthew Greene and Charles Donohoe — pleaded guilty of conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, the January 6 joint session of Congress for certifying the Electoral College vote. 
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