The NAACP sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) Friday in a bid to block the Trump administration from deploying 1,000 poll monitors nationwide during the midterm elections.

While the DOJ has historically operated smaller poll monitoring programs to supervise past elections, the NAACP argues the Trump administration is using poll monitoring as a pretext to intimidate and potentially disenfranchise eligible voters and harass election workers in pursuit of President Donald Trump’s unsupported allegations of widespread voter fraud.

“There is no federal statute that gives Defendants the authority to turn polling places into interrogation rooms,” the NAACP said in its complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for D.C.


The lawsuit asks a federal judge to block the poll monitoring plan under a provision of the Voting Rights Act meant to prevent voter intimidation. The NAACP is also asking for a complete list of specific jurisdictions targeted for monitoring.

“The Voting Rights Act exists to protect voters from exactly this kind of intimidation, including by the DOJ,” said Carmen Daugherty, executive director of the civil rights nonprofit Advancement Project, whose lawyers are involved in the case. “Generations of Black and brown voters faced down sheriffs and poll taxes to cast a ballot, so we know intimidation when we see it.”

The NAACP’s complaint extensively quotes public statements by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Attorney General Todd Blanche saying they want to send the 1,000 monitors to voting sites across the country with an explicit mission to root out voter fraud.

The NAACP previously sued the Trump administration for records about its plan to deploy the monitors to voting sites.

The Justice Department has historically sent “carefully trained” observers to polling locations to ensure election workers complied with federal voting laws and respected citizens’ right to cast ballots — not bar eligible voters from voting based on unproven allegations of fraud, according to the lawsuit.

“The limited deployment of neutral, well-trained federal election monitors to observe compliance with federal civil rights laws is not intimidating where there is a basis for their presence,” the NAACP said.

“A limited, hands-off election monitoring effort is not what the Justice Department is planning this year,” it added.