President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice recently informed Michigan officials it will send election monitors to Detroit during the Aug. 4 primary.
Federal officials were mentioned in Detroit, Lansing and East Lansing, the Detroit News reported.
The Detroit News first reported on the letter that was sent directly to Lansing City Clerk Chris Swope.
“As part of our assessment of your administration of the federal primary election, we plan to have election monitors at your 2026 primary election,” said Timothy Mellett, deputy chief of the Department of Justice’s Voting Section, the News reported. “We will contact you a week prior to election monitoring to discuss the particulars of the monitoring effort.”
Democratic officials responded to the letter opposing the effort, calling the plan a voter suppression tactic.
“Donald Trump and his DOJ have shown they will do anything to try to intimidate Michigan voters and interfere in our elections,” Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist said in a statement. “They lied about election fraud. They’re coming after our voter rolls. They’re using coercion to try to end vote by mail. And now they want to ‘monitor’ our polling places. It is all part of the same playbook.
Gilchrist said Michigan voters should be able to cast their ballots freely, “without federal agents looking over their shoulders.”
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in an interview with MS Now, said Trump is sowing seeds of doubt by pursuing baseless allegations of voter fraud to deliberately confuse voters.
“We welcome observers into our elections to see just how secure they are,” Benson said. “But what we’re seeing here is the President and the Department of Justice continuing to pursue these baseless allegations to confuse voters about the facts.”
The effort to increase the surveillance of voters in majority Democratic cities is a vestige of Trump’s disputed allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden. Trump attacked Detroit and Michigan election officials in the lead-up and aftermath of the November 2020 election. Voting rights advocates said the false attacks were racially motivated.
A GOP-led report on the 2020 election in Michigan found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud.”
Even when Trump won a second term in 2024, he pointed to Detroit’s handling of elections as one place he would have federal officials take over the administration of elections. There is no evidence of systemic fraud in Detroit during the latest presidential election, one which Trump received nearly 8,000 more votes from Detroit voters than in 2020.
The effort to stop Black voters from participating in voting has a dark history in the United States, which denied Black Americans from voting for years after the American Reconstruction era through physical intimidation or unfairly applied poll tests and taxes.
Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, President Harry S. Truman in 1948 urged the passage of stronger federal voting protections, explicitly demanding laws to forbid interference and intimidation by public officers or private individuals during elections.
The law, passed as part of the Civil Rights Movement, ended discriminatory practices like poll taxes and literacy tests and ensures voters of color and language minorities have equal access to the ballot box.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court this year overturned Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as part of the 6-3 ruling (Louisiana v. Callais), narrowing the enforcement of the law, making it easier to challenge political maps that protect minority voting representation.
Trump’s Department of Justice earlier this year requested Michigan’s registered voter list and voting records from Wayne County.
Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel said on Monday the courts have made clear that states run elections, not the federal government.
“We encourage everyone to participate and see for themselves how secure and fair our elections are — but make no mistake, my office stands ready to hold accountable those who attempt to unlawfully interfere with or intimidate Michigan election workers,” Nessel said.
Officials urged to voters in their statements that the right to vote will be protected on Election Day, Aug. 4 and Nov. 5.
