SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department not to threaten election workers who are processing the ballots of people the federal government claims are ineligible to vote. That comes as many election officials nationwide say the federal government is undermining trust in voting procedures. NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks recently got a tip that helped him break a story about the Justice Department notifying places it wants to monitor on Election Day. Like any good beat reporter, he followed it up.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: We had confirmed about 15 different counties who had received them, like you mentioned, in blue, red and purple places. So we were starting to get - and that list seemed to be growing in real time.
PFEIFFER: When I sat down to speak with Miles for our weekly Reporter's Notebook, he said that, although the DOJ sends monitors out in every election, this year, it feels different.
PARKS: We've seen the Department of Justice take a number of unprecedented actions during Trump's second term, whether that is suing states trying to access their sensitive voter data, whether it is the president putting executive actions out there that have been struck down by courts for overreaching his authority. And so when you take all of that as the landscape, the idea that the DOJ would be coming - if you're a county voting official, the DOJ coming to your voting locations, it makes you a little bit more uneasy. But it also makes - what I kept hearing from voting officials is that they were hearing from voters that they were nervous.
PFEIFFER: We mentioned that you were the first to report on some of these notices going out. If you can share how you found that out - are they not made public, and you started to hear from election clerks that these notices were showing up?
PARKS: I got a call from an election official who said, we got a notice, and people here are freaking out. I can't name the election official who first told me that, but I basically emailed and called every election official I know and every person who knows election officials in the country, and just said, I'm hearing these are going out. Have you gotten one, or do you know of anyone who has gotten one of these? And so what that allowed us to do is, A, get a sense of the places that they were going, but more importantly, was talk to the election officials in those places and hear how these requests were being perceived.
PFEIFFER: And in terms of how the requests are being perceived, you had one election clerk, a Democrat, actually say to you on the record that they think it's politically motivated and potentially an intimidation technique. Do they feel like there's a risk to saying that out loud, that they might invite more scrutiny from the administration?
PARKS: I did hear that, and I heard that from a lot of people on background and off the record, as well, who - everyone is very nervous right now to basically get - to be under the scrutiny of the Trump administration. I think we've seen in previous election cycles - 2020 comes to mind - what happens in places like Georgia and Michigan and Arizona, whether it is the death threats that come from that, the political pressure that comes from that if you are an election official in one of these places where the Trump campaign or people who are spreading misinformation around elections are focused. And so, yes, I think there is kind of the underlying fear.
I think this election official knew that it was going to be public that the DOJ was coming to his county and so made the calculated decision to talk with us, and I appreciated that. And I think what was so interesting is he had this situation where the neighboring clerk, who was a Republican, did not receive one of these monitoring notifications. And so...
PFEIFFER: This is interesting. Is this the one - 'cause I went back and read your story - where one of the counties was heavily Latino population, so they have a rule where they provide Spanish language ballots...
PARKS: Exactly.
PFEIFFER: ...And the other doesn't?
PARKS: Exactly. There's a specific provision in the Voting Rights Act that says if a certain percentage of your population is of different ethnicities or different races, based on the U.S. census, then you may be required to provide ballot materials. And so the DOJ is saying we're going to this county because we're interested in enforcing this specific aspect of the Voting Rights Act. Though, I think a lot of election officials, when you tell them that, and that election official in that county, was not comforted by that because this DOJ has not shown any previous interest in enforcing ballot protections for people who speak Spanish.
PFEIFFER: So the DOJ might be saying on the surface, we're just going to make sure everybody gets their Spanish ballot. The clerks are afraid they're going to show up to try to scrutinize, maybe detain Latinos.
PARKS: Exactly. And I think, again, they're - as you mentioned, this same DOJ sent monitors during the primary to close to a dozen states, and on a whole, that was uneventful, that many states who had these monitors at their polling places and at their election offices found no issues. I will say, though, there was one incident in Wyoming where the Republican governor there and the Republican clerk there said there were monitors who were, quote, "aggressive," who did not seem to show a respect for state law around elections. And so, at the same time, I would say, broadly speaking, the election officials I'm talking to are expecting this monitoring effort to go somewhat as normal, but I just think that they're on higher alert than they ever have been about this effort.
PFEIFFER: And are you hearing from the clerks that they have a variety of fears? I mean, one is that a voter shows up and gets detained. One is that voters may not bother to show up and vote because they're afraid of showing up and getting detained. So what's the universe of worries these clerks have about what could play out on Election Day?
PARKS: The one concern that rises above all else goes back to federal law enforcement, goes back to the Department of Justice - not about this monitoring effort, necessarily, but about the idea of ballot seizures and the idea that federal law enforcement could get a search warrant to be able to take possession of ballots. This is something that was not on the radar of local election officials until this year, when the FBI served a search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, which was an area that really was an epicenter for conspiracy theories around the 2020 election. The ballots being seized out of that elections office there was really unprecedented.
PFEIFFER: And remind me - that happened after the election? They came in and said, we want all your paperwork.
PARKS: Exactly. Many years after the election - they basically said, we're investigating crimes around recordkeeping, and so they confiscated all these ballots. But even that idea, the idea that federal law enforcement could confiscate ballots or election materials in the way they did, was pretty unprecedented. And so it just opened up a lot of these clerks' eyes of, like, what happens if it's November 5, and we haven't even finished counting it? We haven't even finished - you know, we're still getting absentee ballots that were postmarked but haven't been counted yet. You know, there - we're still kind of in the thick of it of trying to determine how many votes we have at all, and we get a knock on the door, and it's federal law enforcement, and they're saying we have a signed search warrant, and we're able to seize X number of ballots. Again, it's an outlandish scenario, but it's one that I can tell you election officials across the country have been preparing for all year.
PFEIFFER: I was going to say - I'm sure many of them would say it's not that outlandish.
PARKS: Feels less outlandish now than it ever has before.
PFEIFFER: Were the same issues at play when you first began and now it's just gotten more and more intense over the decade? Or are you actually seeing new things now that you never saw and couldn't have imagined seeing when you started this beat?
PARKS: Definitely, the latter. And I think what has been so interesting about covering this beat the last few election cycles is that every election has had actually a different sort of red blinking light concern. When I think of the post-2016 election cycle - after the Russian election interference in 2016 - for four years, everyone was talking about cybersecurity. Just the idea of foreign election interference, trying to make sure we - you know, we had not been spending a lot of time thinking about hardening our systems until that moment - was a real wake-up call where counties everywhere were thinking about cybersecurity in a new way.
After 2020, it was physical security and all the threats that came from, you know, that intense, intense period that led up to January 6. After 2024, it has been how to interact with a federal government that is being helmed by a person who does not believe elections are legitimate. And that has just raised a whole slew of new questions election officials have never interacted with before.
PFEIFFER: We obviously don't know how the election will play out. Maybe the election monitoring will go perfectly fine. But if you are still covering this beat four years from now in the next election, any way for you to forecast where we're headed, what we might see that's the new iteration of this in four years?
PARKS: Honestly, the thing I'm most curious about is this brand of election denial that President Trump has been kind of seeding in the American public for 10 years. Where does that go from here, and specifically, among Democrats? I think we're at a point right now where - and again, at this point, election - I want to be very clear that election denial is being propped up on the right. But when you ask polling questions about how people feel about election results, because of all the fears about the federal government, there are a lot of people on the left who feel that if Republicans win this midterm election, it will be because of some sort of fraud or malfeasance.
And it's very possible that that is not the case, that Republicans - you know, this is going to be a very tightly contested election in the House, in the U.S. Senate. And so when the entire American electorate is feeling as cynical and as scared and as existential as they are right now, I think it would be naive to think that this level of distrust is going to continue to be isolated among a small portion of Republicans.
PFEIFFER: On Election Day, Miles, there are so many places you could go. Will you go somewhere physically? Will you just work the phones? What are you going to do on Election Day?
PARKS: I will be here at NPR headquarters, probably for 24 straight hours. And then my plan is, on the day after the election - Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday night - we should have a better sense of the places that are still contested, and that will be where I head.
PFEIFFER: I hope we'll be able to have you back on the show after you visited some of those election sites, and you can tell us what you saw and how this played out.
PARKS: Always happy to do it, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: That is NPR's Miles Parks. Thank you.
PARKS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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