Fairfax County voters heading to the polls Tuesday, Nov. 3, may encounter federal election monitors outside their polling places.

The U.S. Department of Justice named Fairfax as one of four Virginia jurisdictions targeted in what the agency called its largest election monitoring effort ever. The DOJ announced approximately 1,000 monitors and observers deployed nationwide, covering all 50 states for the first time.

The other Virginia jurisdictions on the list are Charlottesville, Prince William County and Virginia Beach.

The DOJ did not say how many of those 1,000 monitors would be assigned to Virginia or to Fairfax specifically, according to the Virginia Mercury.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in the DOJ's announcement that the department was pursuing transparency for elections "in an assertive and nondiscriminatory manner."

The effort is coordinated by the Civil Rights Division. Monitors include personnel from DOJ divisions, U.S. Attorney's Offices and federal observers from the Office of Personnel Management, according to the announcement. They will check compliance with federal voting rights statutes, disability access laws and protections against voter intimidation.

What monitors can and cannot do

Under Virginia law, federal monitors need written consent from local election officials to enter a polling location, according to a joint Oct. 15 bulletin from Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones' office and the Department of Elections, as reported by The Virginian-Pilot.

Without that permission, monitors must stay at least 40 feet from the polling station entrance.

Virginia Elections Commissioner Steve Koski told VPM News that DOJ monitors must follow the same state rules as neutral observers. They can see and hear what happens inside a polling location but cannot speak to voters or election officers, Koski said.

Whether Fairfax County's registrar or electoral board granted the DOJ permission to station monitors inside local polling places was not clear from available reports.

Two Virginia localities said no

Prince William County elections director Eric Olsen denied DOJ monitors access to his county's polling places in an Oct. 26 message to the department, according to VPM. Olsen accused DOJ officials of making "vague public threats towards election officials that are not only unfounded and inappropriate but create safety concerns for our volunteer election officers."

Virginia Beach's Electoral Board voted 3-0 to deny the DOJ and the NAACP permission to have observers inside precincts, according to The Virginian-Pilot. Virginia Beach registrar Christine Lewis said four to six federal monitors would still come but remain outside the 40-foot perimeter. "So I'm not concerned about it at all," Lewis said.

Concerns from voting-rights groups

Some voting-rights groups, including the NAACP, said they believe the deployment could suppress turnout and disenfranchise voters, particularly from minority groups, USA Today reported.

NAACP senior general counsel Anthony Ashton told The Virginian-Pilot that the organization is concerned about the DOJ's motives. "Unfortunately, this is not the same Department of Justice as there was a few years ago," Ashton said.

The deployment is more than triple the nearly 300 federal monitors sent during the 2022 midterms and exceeds the 700 dispatched for the 2024 presidential election, according to The Virginian-Pilot. In 2022, the Biden administration sent 289 observers to 24 states.

In a court filing, the DOJ said monitors would not act as law enforcement, would not carry firearms and had been trained not to interfere with the voting process, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow. FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees will not serve as monitors, according to that same filing.

Voters with questions or complaints about federal voting rights can call the DOJ's election issues hotline at 1-800-253-3931 or email [email protected].