Volunteer poll monitors are hoping for a smooth Election Day, but training for trouble

Across the country, volunteers are wrapping up trainings to serve as poll monitors on Election Day. It’s a longstanding tradition that puts observers on the ground so they can report whether anyone tries to intimidate voters or interfere with their legal rights, or otherwise break the law. But this year, the training has looked a little different.

In addition to learning how to respond to typical problems—like if a polling place isn’t wheelchair accessible or doesn’t open on time, or political activists show up with signs—volunteers are prepping for scenarios that would have seemed unfathomable under past administrations: What if ICE shows up at the polls, or the National Guard? What if the Justice Department’s own poll monitors try to interfere?

“If you’re nervous, you can retreat to a safe distance, then observe and report,” Buddy Norton, an attorney leading a training in Santa Clara County, California, told a room of about 30 people this week.

“I wasn’t surprised—I mean, I read the news,” says Tim, a 70-year-old retired law professor from nearby Alameda County who has volunteered as a poll monitor for about four years, and who attended another virtual training that prepped him on possible ICE encounters.

It’s against federal law to order armed law enforcement to the polls. California—a target of the Trump administration’s latest (unsuccessful) efforts to meddle in the midterms—has a separate law that generally prohibits officers from making arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said that ICE won’t patrol election sites, and that its officers would only deploy to them to investigate “specific threats.” Elections experts I spoke with aren’t expecting them to be there.

But a national poll recently found that 40 percent of respondents worry they might be, and state and local officials nationwide, as well as advocacy groups that train poll monitors, are game-planning for this possibility—not to mention any other way the administration may try to interfere with the voting process or discount election results.

“We’re in the expect-the-unexpected mode—preparing for the what ifs,” says Brittany Stonesifer, a program manager at Common Cause, which has trained volunteers in California and other states. “We’re prepared for bad actors, whoever they may be. There’s been an avalanche of attempts to interfere.”

President Donald Trump has been railing about alleged voter fraud ever since he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, creating widespread concern, particularly given the violent events of January 6, 2021, and Trump’s blanket pardon of the rioters. In recent months, his administration has demanded states turn over their voter lists, and has tried—again, unsuccessfully—to alter mail-voting rules. The Department of Justice recently sued California elections officialas, seeking to prevent them from counting 20,000 ballots the administration claims may belong to noncitizens.

In Alaska, the DOJ has sued to preemptively block certification of a Senate race if the Republican candidate loses. “For the first time in American history,” the feds have become “an adversary to state and local election officials, rather than a partner and a collaborator,” elections expert David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now leads the “fiercely nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research, told me this week.

In multiple states, ICE agents recently went door-to-door investigating whether immigrants at those addresses were improperly registered to vote, and posted videos of their efforts on social media. “It’s a textbook case of voter intimidation,” says Beau Tremitiere, an attorney at the Protect Democracy Project, which sued the administration in partnership with the National Immigration Law Center and San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, to stop the door-knocking. A federal court has ordered the agency to refrain from its efforts, at least until after Election Day.

“It’s a state responsibility to register voters and maintain accurate voter lists, not a federal responsibility,” says Eileen Ma of the Asian Law Caucus, which is also training poll monitors in California.

During the training I attended in Santa Clara County, attorney Norton, calling in over Zoom, told volunteers that National Guard officers had been spotted at a ballot drop box in DC. (The Guard later put out a statement saying officers there were directed not to monitor or secure polling locations.) Giselle Garcia of NorCal Resist, a grassroots group that responds to ICE sightings in Northern California, told me that her team documented six cars of ICE agents outside the Sutter County elections office in October, after early voting had begun.

The county registrar, Donna Johnston, told CBS News that she did not believe the officers were trying to intimidate anyone, and DHS said they had permission from a representative of the elections office to park outside while waiting for a man to exit a courthouse. But a person of color had spotted them and, terrified, called NorCal Resist, Garcia told me, adding that one of the officers got out of his vehicle and taunted her volunteer.

At the Common Cause trainings, facilitators teach poll monitors that voter intimidation is a crime regardless of who does it. “It’s not just private actors—it’s also police or state actors or federal agents,” says program manager Stonesifer.

She instructs volunteers to take detailed notes if they see anything inappropriate—documenting which agency an officer is from, if applicable, while maintaining a safe distance—and then report the information to attorneys and other staffers at the group’s headquarters, who can decide how to respond.

Volunteers are also instructed to look out for the DOJ’s poll monitors, who haven’t “been an issue in the past,” she says, “but given everything we’ve seen from this administration, we can’t be fully confident” they’ll follow the rules. The administration is deploying about 1,000 monitors across all 50 states, a substantial increase from the 2022 midterms and the 2024 general election, when it sent about 289 and 714 monitors, respectively.

This week the DOJ announced that ICE and FBI officers would not be among the monitors, but unarmed officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA would be. The DOJ’s plan prompted the clerk of Michigan’s Ingham County to give her election workers additional training. The feds “can watch the process,” she told The New York Times. “They can’t touch anything, they can’t ask any questions.”

Tim, the volunteer poll monitor from Alameda County, who was trained by the Asian Law Caucus and asked that I not include his last name for fear he might be doxxed, said he’s not expecting to encounter armed federal agents on Election Day, but he’s glad for the extra prep so he’s ready if he does. “It’s a little sad and disturbing” that it’s even an issue, he told me.

A more pressing question might be what happens after polls close, when the vote counting begins. In California, Common Cause is also training monitors for that stage of the process, “to look for any ballots that are being mysteriously set aside,” Stonesifer says. The group worries local or state officials might feel pressure on account of the DOJ lawsuit over the 20,000 ballots, even though the government’s demands have been rejected by the courts. On Friday, a federal appeals court upheld Wednesday’s ruling by a district court judge, who said granting the request “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway,” and that the administration was likely using unreliable data to inflate the number of noncitizen voters. In between the two rulings, the DOJ managed to escalate the situation by sending a spate of grand jury subpoenas to state elections officials.

Becker, at the Center for Election Innovation and Research, remains optimistic that all the administration’s recent attempts will be shut down by the courts. “This is all a lot of noise, and it’s failing,” he says.

Meanwhile, all this activity has sparked great public interest in safeguarding the election. Stonesifer of Common Cause says coordination among voting rights group across state lines “has significantly increased” during this midterm cycle. “Our national partners are going to be monitoring what happens all the way through certification, through January, to make sure there’s no additional attempts to interfere with the seating of winners of congressional seats,” she said.

At the Santa Clara County training, facilitators from the coalition Bay Resistance also emphasized interstate solidarity: They asked volunteers to sign a pledge promising to protest if the administration crosses any “red lines” anywhere in the country, whether those lines involve an attempt to seize ballots or a refusal to certify election results. Until the next Congress is seated, the facilitators warned, anything could happen. “It might not happen here in the Bay, but it will happen,” they said, and “we will have to take action.”

Almost all the volunteers signed up.