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NR Nathaniel Rakich Nathaniel Rakich Managing editor at Votebeat.

“DOJ election monitors are a common thing in elections. They have been happening for decades. They are there to observe only. They don't interfere with voting. They happened in this year's primaries with almost no incidents. … These are lawyers, essentially, whose job it is to make sure that the Voting Rights Act and the Help America Vote Act are being complied with.”

GD POLITICS · Policy · October 2026

“DOJ election monitors are a common thing in elections. They have been happening for decades. They are there to observe only. They don't interfere with voting. They happened in this year's primaries with almost no incidents. … These are lawyers, essentially, whose job it is to make sure that the Voting Rights Act and the Help America Vote Act are being complied with.” — Nathaniel Rakich, GD POLITICS

Context

Discussing the Justice Department's plan to send monitors to all 50 states, the elections analyst separates the practice from fears about agents at polling places, and explains what monitors legally do.

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Transcript

GD POLITICS
Nathaniel Rakich

…reasons. You know, there's always a lot of concern about that from both the left and the right. I've actually seen more of it from the left this year, I would say. But basically what happens is that almost always this is a result of just kind of like fat fingering or maybe the way to just call

Galen Druke

those people on social media fat, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel Rakich

…on the machine and fix it. So that's one thing. The other thing that I would say is the Department of Justice, they've been active lately, you know, but they've said that they are sending a thousand election monitors to all 50 states, which is the biggest election monitoring program that the department has ever done. So obviously that part of it is unprecedented, but I do want to note that like DOJ election monitors are a common thing in elections. They have been happening for decades. They are there to observe only. They don't interfere with voting. They happened in this year's primaries with almost no incidents. So this is not, this is a very distinct category from like fears of ICE agents of the polls or other types of like armed agents. These are lawyers, essentially, whose job it is to make sure that the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, these kind of more anodyne features of election law are being complied with.

Galen Druke

I have a personal question. I voted yesterday early in person. Have you voted yet?

Nathaniel Rakich

I have not. I'm going to wait for election day.

Galen Druke

You're in election day, girly. I think I could have guessed that, actually. You've seen. I actually, I haven't voted on election

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from GD POLITICS

“Almost always this is a result of fat-fingering, or people hitting the screen too hard, which can mess up the calibration. In almost every jurisdiction, even with a touchscreen machine, it prints out a paper ballot with those choices. The machine does not record your vote immediately. So voters who are concerned should check that paper record, and if it's not correct, you can try again and fix it.” — Nathaniel Rakich, GD POLITICS “Florida is the fastest state in the country at reporting results. They drop things within half an hour, and they'll have two-thirds of the vote. Florida is the new California, not in vote counting speed but in how many competitive House races there are. There are six or seven races that I'm watching.” — Nathaniel Rakich, GD POLITICS