There are a lot of things Donald Trump won’t do to help his party win the 2026 midterm elections: he won’t direct his attention to improving the economy, he won’t stop using tariffs that make the economy worse, and he won’t get us out of his disastrous war of choice with Iran. But what he will do is continue to spread lies about election integrity and use the federal government to engage in a variety of election interference efforts.
The latest comes from Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon, who announced that DOJ would send out 1,000 election monitors for the midterm elections, while also complaining about their failed efforts to access state voter rolls.
Democracy Docket reports:
“We began our election security work almost as soon as I was sworn in last April. This is an ongoing duty and obligation,” Dhillon said. “The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to election hot spots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems and we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary. We’re going to do it to the tune of approximately a thousand election monitors in the November election, and this is just something that DOJ does.” … Dhillon’s comments come as the department refuses to retreat from its sweeping voter roll campaign despite a steady stream of losses in federal court. DOJ has lost all 23 district court cases in which judges have ruled on its effort to use Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to force states to provide their full statewide voter-registration databases, including sensitive information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has also rejected DOJ’s position, and on Friday the full appeals court declined the department’s request to rehear the case. Dhillon suggested the Supreme Court could be next. …
Dhillon also made sweeping claims Monday about what DOJ says it has found in states that have cooperated with the department’s voter roll efforts. “We don’t know the scale of this problem because two-thirds of the states are refusing to cooperate with the Department of Justice’s efforts to help them clean up their voter rolls,” Dhillon said. “In the states that have cooperated with us, there are hundreds of thousands of dead people on the voter rolls, and there are tens of thousands of people who are not citizens on the voter rolls.” Dhillon did not identify the states or provide evidence supporting those figures during the interview. She also acknowledged that DOJ must conduct further verification before determining whether anyone actually voted illegally.
Election monitors are a good thing under any normal administration. But this one is a different story. Its relentless effort to push a voter-fraud narrative that it can’t back up with evidence—in court or anywhere else—is meant to subvert an election outcome it does not like. It wants not to fix existing problems but to create problems where none exist.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.