From the Arkansas Advocate:
The U.S. Department of Justice will send election monitors to Arkansas’ two most populous counties on Election Day, prompting one of the counties to vote to not allow them inside polling places.
The decision to send monitors to Washington and Pulaski counties comes several days after the start of early voting. The Washington County Election Commission cited a lack of timely notification from the federal government as its reason for not allowing the monitors inside polling places.
The Pulaski County Election Commission will meet at 7 p.m. Thursday to consider the same decision, election coordinator Amanda Dickens said.
Washington County’s commissioners said there was no reason to monitor its elections, citing the accuracy of the recount it conducted in April’s Republican secretary of state primary runoff.
Commissioner Matt Mendenhall said he was frustrated that the Justice Department did not tell the commission how many monitors it will send until nearly a week after first announcing the plan.
“I think that some of those people from the Justice Department could learn something if they would come here and do it, but it’s got to be done right,” Mendenhall said. “It’s got to be planned, and your lack of planning is not our emergency.”
The federal government has the authority to monitor polling places, with permission from local election officials, to ensure compliance with election laws and procedures. The Justice Department confirmed Friday that it will send monitors to all 50 states.
Dickens said Justice Department officials told her they will send four to six election monitors, who will be in plainclothes and stationed 100 feet outside the polling place. If they speak to voters at all, they will do so only to ask about their experience voting, Dickens said.
“They said that they’re not going to be intervening at all,” she said. “They’re just going to be like a fly on the wall.”
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration has spent the past week trying to assert authority over election officials in multiple states.
In 2024, when Democrat Joe Biden was president, Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ spokesperson, Sam Dubke, told ABC News that Sanders would “not permit the Department of Justice to improperly intimidate or unduly influence Arkansas voters.”
On Monday, Dubke said Sanders’ administration “will continue to work with state and federal partners to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat in the upcoming elections.”
Republican Secretary of State Cole Jester said through a spokesperson that his office has “no objection” to federal officials observing Arkansas’ elections.
“Transparency and accountability are essential to maintaining public trust,” Jester said.
Nearly 280,000 Arkansans have cast a ballot since early voting began.
Projected Democratic gains
The Trump administration’s actions come on the heels of projections that Democrats will flip at least one chamber of Congress, and some Republican-held U.S. House seats are considered competitive.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is directing fundraising efforts toward central Arkansas’ 2nd Congressional District, and the Almanac of American Politics moved Arkansas’ U.S. Senate race from safe to “likely” Republican.
The move also comes as Democrats say they’re hopefulthey can make gains in Washington County.
The Justice Department has not disclosed why it chose the two counties it did, prompting concerns from Wendell Griffen and Dana Deree, the Democratic nominees for county judge in Pulaski and Washington counties, respectively.
The two candidates released a joint statement Sunday on Facebook, noting that their counties are among Arkansas’ most politically and racially diverse. Little Rock and northwest Arkansas are home to large populations of Spanish speakers, and Washington County has a significant Marshallese population.
“We are aware of no credible evidence of irregularities in either county that explains this deployment,” Griffen and Deree said. “The Justice Department should disclose its selection criteria and explain whether it applies the same standards to predominantly Republican-voting areas and predominantly white communities elsewhere in Arkansas. Neither a community’s racial composition nor its political preferences should invite selective scrutiny or intimidation.”
Public feedback
The Washington County Election Commission’s decision to keep election monitors out of polling places came after half an hour of county residents urging them to take this stand.
Herschel Hartford, who uses a wheelchair, said the county has always given him the proper accommodations to vote.
“We do this because all of us are neighbors, not because federal overseers are watching over our shoulders,” Hartford said.
Beth Coger, who represents northeastern Fayetteville on the Washington County Quorum Court, said the area’s immigrant families have been afraid to go out in public due to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the area and nationwide for months.
“Against that backdrop, imagine how the presence of federal officials at polling places might be perceived by some voters, particularly Black and Brown voters, naturalized citizens, and members of immigrant families,” Coger said.
The Trump administration faced two lawsuits in September from civil rights groups opposing a federal policy to allow ICE agents to enter polling locations in certain circumstances.
For AR People, a progressive political organizing group, issued a call Monday afternoon for Pulaski County residents to “help defend local democracy” by attending Thursday’s election commission meeting and signing up for public comment.
“Respectfully ask the Commission to protect Arkansas’s Constitutional right to conduct its own elections, free from government overreach and interference,” For AR People said in a news release.
