US Department of Justice to deploy federal elections monitors to Alaska, locations unknown

The U.S. Justice Department announced this week that it plans to deploy 1,000 federal monitors across all 50 states. That includes Alaska polling places but there are few details on where monitoring will take place.

A DOJ spokesperson told States Newsroom this week that the full list of monitored locations won’t be disclosed until Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

The federal poll monitoring initiative is larger this year than previous years. In the 2022 midterm elections, the Biden Administration’s DOJ sent monitors to 64 jurisdictions in 24 states. 

Officials with the Alaska Division of Elections did not respond to a request for more information on federal monitoring or say if the DOJ is coordinating with the division on Thursday. 

Early voting in Alaska is already underway, with nearly 10% of voters or over 58,000 people having cast ballots as of Tuesday. The number already outpaces early voting in the 2022 midterms. Other states are seeing a similar wave of early voting — as of Thursday, 46.3 million voters nationwide had cast their ballots already, according to the University of Florida’s UF Elections Lab.

Federal monitoring of operations at polling places is not new for Alaska, particularly in rural and Alaska Native-majority regions. Monitors watch for compliance with the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, the Help America Vote Act and other federal laws to make sure there is equal access to the polls. 

In the 2024 general election, the DOJ announced plans to monitor several rural precincts for compliance with federal requirements for language assistance, including in the Bethel, Dillingham, Kusilvak, and Nome census areas and the North Slope and Northwest Arctic boroughs. 

In 2023, federal monitoring of local elections took place in the North Slope Borough, and the Dillingham and Kusilvak census areas as voters cast ballots in school board and local city and borough elections.

In 2022, federal monitors were sent to the Dillingham, Bethel and Kusilvak census areas, as well as Sitka. During the August primary, monitors observed polling places in the three Southwest Alaska regions as well as in Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks.  

A DOJ investigation of voting in 2022 and 2023 elections documented access violations for voters with disabilities and cited the Division of Elections. The findings included a lack of accessible machines at polling places and lack of accessible features on the division’s website. 

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has an online form for voters to report complaints of federal law violations. 

The Division also has a voter complaint form for violations of the Help America Vote Act on its website, and a complaint hotline at 1-888-465-5857. It also has resources for accessibility assistance, including language assistance, on its website or by phone at (907) 465-4611.