US DOJ Sending Election Monitors To Manchester, Nashua For 2026 Primaries

By Michael Graham, NH Journal

Voters in Manchester and Nashua who cast their ballots in the Sept. 8 primary will do so under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of Justice.

“This coming primary season, the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, as it has done for decades, is this year sending election monitors into 15 different jurisdictions in six states,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced Tuesday. Dhillon heads the civil rights division.

The six states are Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

The news comes not long after New Hampshire beat back an attempt by the Trump DOJ to force the state to hand over its voter rolls, raising questions about the motives behind the move. New Hampshire has one of the highest voter participation rates and an Election Day that typically features swift ballot counting and few problems.

Nonetheless, Dhillon claimed the monitors are being sent into cities and counties “where there may have been some problems in the recent elections,” while describing the practice as routine.

“This is something that DOJ does routinely,” Dhillon said, noting the department sent monitors to primary elections in 2022 and expanded its election-monitoring footprint in 2024.

Dhillon named Manchester and Nashua among the jurisdictions where federal monitors are expected to be present.

The announcement comes at a sensitive moment for New Hampshire election officials.

On June 29, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante dismissed a DOJ lawsuit seeking New Hampshire’s unredacted statewide voter registration list. Secretary of State David Scanlan had refused to turn over the data, citing voter privacy and arguing the federal government had not justified its demand.

“I am committed to protecting the private information of New Hampshire voters to the fullest extent required by law,” Scanlan said at the time. “There does not appear to be any provision under federal law that compels the production of voter registration data superseding the provisions of New Hampshire statutes that I must follow.”

Laplante agreed, finding that DOJ’s request did not comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and that the department failed to allege a valid violation under the Help America Vote Act.

Now, the federal government is pivoting from voter records to polling places.

DOJ officials say the monitors are intended to ensure compliance with federal voting rights laws, including access for voters with disabilities, language access requirements, polling hours and other election procedures. Dhillon also tied the effort to the department’s broader concern about illegal voting.

“It’s also important to make sure that our voting is accurate so that every citizen who votes has their vote counted equally without being canceled out by somebody who shouldn’t be voting,” Dhillon said.

Dhillon also sent letters to election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, warning them that they could personally face criminal liability if they knowingly retain noncitizens on voter rolls or facilitate noncitizen voting.

Critics say the timing raises questions about whether the Trump administration is using DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to pressure state and local election officials. With the exception of New Hampshire, the states targeted for primary monitoring are led by Democratic governors and chief election officials.

Dhillon insists the monitoring is nothing new.

“For decades,” she said, DOJ has sent personnel into jurisdictions to monitor elections and protect voting rights.

The New Hampshire deployments are notable because the state’s most prominent recent election problems occurred not in Manchester or Nashua, but in Windham and Bedford.

After the 2020 election, Windham became the focus of national attention when discrepancies appeared in a state representative race. A forensic audit later concluded that misaligned machine folds in absentee ballots, combined with scanner issues, were the primary cause of the miscount.

In Bedford, state officials found that 190 absentee ballots from the 2020 election were never counted after most were accidentally placed in the wrong box. Investigators said the mistake did not change the outcome of any race.

Both cases were handled at the state level. Election monitors were later appointed for Bedford, Windham, and Laconia Ward 6 after the Attorney General’s Office found significant deficiencies in those communities’ 2020 election procedures.

New Hampshire’s elections are administered locally by city and town officials, with the secretary of state and attorney general playing statewide oversight roles. That has long been a point of pride for state election officials, who frequently argue the state’s decentralized system helps protect election integrity.

The arrival of federal monitors in the state’s two largest cities is likely to add another layer of scrutiny to an already high-profile election year. New Hampshire voters go to the polls Sept. 8 for primaries that will help decide races for U.S. Senate, Congress, governor, and the State House.

Dhillon has already signaled that DOJ’s election-monitoring operation will grow before the November general election.

“Stay tuned as we get towards the general election,” Dhillon said, “where there’ll be an even more expanded program for vote monitors.”

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.